Held as one of the most highly regarded facts of the scientific community, theories often change with the presentation of new evidence. However, the motivation behind obtaining this new evidence is often overlooked, wrought with political and personal motives guiding the work of scientists, as these scientists are able to make an impact on the rest of the world. Though separated by a century, Louis Pasteur and Rachel Carson offered evidence to solve some of the biggest questions of their time period, with Louis Pasteur effectively concluding the spontaneous generation debate and Rachel Carson promoting awareness of our careless use of DDT and the impact this had on future generations.
By the mid 1800’s, Louis Pasteur was caught up in the spontaneous generation debate after reviewing the contradictory experiments performed by Francesco Redi, John Needham, and Lazarro Spallanzani. Two centuries prior to Pasteur, Redi had argued that spontaneous generation could not occur, supported with experimental evidence. However, only one century prior to Pasteur, John Needham had shown that growth would occur in a flask of sterilized broth, which directly refuted Redi’s claim that spontaneous generation did not occur. Seeing a flaw in Needham’s experiment, Spallanzani repeated the experiment, this time sterilizing the broth and the air present in the flask. Without this source of contamination, the flask remained sterilized, while a similar flask of broth which he left open to the environment began to show signs of growth. In refute of Spallanzani, those who believed in spontaneous generation said that the air carried a necessary “life force” which life may directly come from. One hundred years later, Louis Pasteur joins the debate...
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...n with their work, the needs of society demanded their work be done, whether explicitly stated or not. Society had failed to recognize a potential threat in their time period and the work of these people changed the way people conducted their lives. Without people like Pasteur and Carson to correct the overlooked mistakes made by society, society may crumble under the weight of its own ignorance.
Works Cited
1-9 Spontaneous generation was an attractive theory to many people, but was ultimately disproven.. (2003, January 1). . Retrieved May 8, 2014, from http://www.microbiologytext.com/index.php?module=Book&func=displayarticle&art_id=27
Regis, E. (2008). What is life?: investigating the nature of life in the age of synthetic biology. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Carson, R., & Darling, L. (1962). Silent spring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin ;.
In the summer of 1995, the periodical Wilson Quarterly published "Enemies of Promise," an essay by J. Michael Bishop, a Nobel Prize-winning professor of microbiology from the University of California, San Francisco. The essay addressed the renewed criticism the scientific community has received in recent years by an ignorant and unduly critical public. The overall effect this single work has had on the world may be nominal, but the points Professor Bishop raises are significant, and provide ammunition against the ignorants who maintain this "intellectual war," centuries after it was sparked.
There is no greater example of this than the change of thought amongst people regarding Miasma. Until this time it was a long held belief that Miasma (polluted air) was the cause of illness. This shifting in the public’s conviction shows how both science and medicine can impact society. Consequently this shift in knowledge occurred as the result of one of history’s most significant contributions to science, the discovery of fermentation. Rosenberg identifies Pasteur’s discovery as one of the defining elements to the eventual identification and eradication of cholera. Rosenberg plainly outlines the changes occurring in the field of science and from his writing it could be assumed that this was also the first introduction to the ontological theory of disease (external source of illness). Pasteur’s fermentation experiments were occurring at the same time as the Cholera epidemic and his results showed that spontaneous generation was not to blame but instead a microscopic bacteria. Fungi as a source of illness among plants, animals, and humans was already widely accepted, as a result the causation of disease took a change of course and the foundation of Germ Theory was
The next theory that he disproved was the “Primordial Soup Theory”. Sir Fred Hoyle scoffed at the ridiculous atheistic notion when he said, “The notion that a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial organic soup here on earth is evidently nonsense of a high order.” “There was no primeval soup, neither on this planet, nor on any other, and if the beginning of life were not random, life must therefore have been the product of purposeful intelligence” (Donyes
As the decades pass, technological advances have enabled researchers, entrepenures and pondering minds the ability to discover more and more about every aspect of our very existence. Over the past three decades the evolutionary tree of life has been expanded at least seven times over. Major advances have been made in the area of evolution to open the eyes of many to the extensive history of the earth. For the very first time, we have tangible knowledge that life evolved and grew to become a flourishing success during the young ages of the Earth. By 3.5 million years ago life was already well advanced. Before this breakthrough no one could have thought that life occurred so amazingly early, that Earth was inhabited by a huge array of tiny life forms through t the first four-fifths of it’s existence, and no one deduced that evolution itself evolved over geologic time.
The Primordial Soup Hypothesis was proposed by biochemist Alexander Oparin in 1924. He claimed that life started in a warm body of water due to a combination of chemicals which led to form amino acids then to form proteins. The evidence that he used was that organic compounds may have endured a sequence of reactions that created more and more complex molecules. An experiment conducted to test this theory was the Miller-Urey Experiment done by Stanley Miller and Harold Urey.
Barry depicts the work of a researcher to be complex and challenging, and that each synopsis of a situation has obstacles that can only be surpassed by the necessary characteristics of a scientist. Barry uses the examination of a rock to show the mindset a scientist must have in order to obtain the wanted information. Including how researchers use the traits of not only curiosity and creativity, but also patience and forethought strengthens Barry’s claim of the predicaments a scientist may encounter and how he would overcome them, “Would a pick be best, or would dynamite be better - or would dynamite be too indiscriminately destructive?” (Barry 40-42). Throughout the passage Barry uses several rhetorical strategies to characterize his claims and to allow his audience to grasp an understanding of how scientific research, although difficult and riddled with obstacles, encompasses humankind’s need for
Darwin, Charles, and David Quammen. On the Origin of Species. New York: Sterling, 2008. 349. Print.
Primordial Soup Theory claims that life began in a pond or a ocean because of a combination of chemicals from the atmosphere and some form of energy to make amino acids, the monomers of proteins, which would then evolve into all the species. In this theory, the basic building blocks of life came from simple molecules which form the atmosphere.This was then energized by lightning and rain.According to this theory the first organism’s would have to be simple heterotrophs.They would become autotrophs through mutation.However,evidence now suggests that the first organisms were autotrophs..The scientists involved in the hypothesis were A.I Oparin,J.B.S.Haldane, Stanley Miller,Harold Urey, Sidney Fox.Oparin and Haldane both
The debate among creationists and evolutionists as to the origin of modern life on Earth has pushed increasingly into the limelight over the last several years. Unfortunately, such mainstream coverage has caused many of the related issues to become skewed and misinterpreted. In the article “Five Major Misconceptions about Evolution,” Mark Isaak attempts to make clear the true nature of evolutionary theory so that, if it must be challenged, such arguments can be made on a purely factual basis rather than, as Isaak says, “against a set of misunderstandings that people are right to consider ludicrous” (“Misconceptions” Para. 1). He presents these misconceptions and his explanation of the faulty logic behind each one in five main categories: “Evolution has never been observed,” “Evolution violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics,” “There are no transitional fossils,” “The theory of evolution says that life originated, and evolution proceeds, by random chance,” and “Evolution is only a theory; it hasn't been proved” (“Misconceptions” Para. 2). In addressing each of these proposed falsehoods individually, Isaak forms an argument with few faults that is clear, precise, and effective.
All through the history of mankind, many important inventions discoveries have been made, and they have helped the human race advance towards a more happy and healthy lifestyle. This success was not achieved by solely doing the “right” things all of the time. Many times, mistakes are made, and these mistakes often lead to the greatest scientific discoveries. Lewis Thomas, a biologist and author of The Medusa and the Snail, argues that making no mistakes will not get anything useful done. Thomas’s argument is valid and it should be considered correct because a great quantity of major inventions and discoveries were created when people made mistakes.
The book draws its name from the first essay, "The Lives of a Cell," in which Thomas offers his observations on ecology and the role of cellular activity. He writes that the "uniformity of the earth's life, more astonishing then its diversity, is accountable by the high probability that we derived, originally, from some single cell, fertilized in a bolt of lightning as the earth cooled" (3).
The 1800’s was a time of development in science. New and what seemed like crazy ideas were surfacing. These ideas were more easily accepted than in past years. There were new theories such as the Cell Theory by Mathias Schleiden and Theodor Schwann in 1838 (Farah 626) and the Atomic Theory by John Dalton (Farah 628).A little over a decade after the Cell Theory was proposed, Louis Pasteur discovered bacteria in 1850 (Farah 627).
The primordial soup theory was proposed in 1924.They believed that with the gasses in the atmosphere and the compounds in the ocean, along with strikes of lightning, this could suddenly form amino acids to form the first life forms. Later, in 1953, Stanley Miller and Harold Urey tested the hypothesis with an experiment known as the Miller-Urey experiment, which included gases from a reducing atmosphere, a simulation of an ocean, and lightning strikes to cause the organic compounds to form. This experiment did show that the compounds formed in this environment. Scientists later found flaws with the experiment, such as they simulated constant strikes of lightning, but lightning strikes are not constant on Earth even though they are very frequent. Joan Oro also showed that adenine was formed by heating water-based ammonia and cyanide
Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA, has said that “the origin of life appears to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have to be satisfied to get it going” (Horgan 27).2 Noted evolutionary astronomer Frederick Hoyle has described the chances of life having evolved from nonlife to be about as likely as the chances that “a tornado sweeping through a junkyard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein” (Johnson 106). Why do respected scientists doubt what textbooks teach as fact? It would appear that these scientists know something that current theories describing the origin of life fail to explain. While current theories describe scenarios in which genetic material such as RNA becomes entrapped in a protective cell membrane as a likely recipe for the formation of life, they generally do not focus on the difficulties of forming and concentrating all of these components in the first place.3 To clarify, current theories suffer from what I call the “cookbook mentality.
Our basic objective is to examine the scientific developments through history and how they affect human life and society. To meet that objective we will first develop tools to analyze the relationship between science and the increasingly complex decisions we have to make regarding the way we apply science for human welfare.