Teoría de biogénesis (inglés)

Biogenesis Theory
What is Biogenesis? The word biogenesis comes from the Greek bios and genesis. Bios means life, course or way of living. In the other hand, genesis means origin, creation orgeneration (Harper, 2010). So seeing it as a whole, biogenesis is a theory of life origin. Biogenesis states that life can only be originated from preexisting life and not from inanimate matter, stated intheories like spontaneous generation or abiogenesis.

Origin of biogenesis theory Antoni Van Leeuwenhoek, a scientist from Netherlands, made a simple experiment which spread rapidly through Europe.He used a single lens microscope and observed really small organisms in dirty fluids scraped from his teeth (Camat, 2009). Unfortunately, scientists of the epoch used spontaneous generation theory toexplain this “animalcules” observed by Leeuwenhoek. Today we know this organisms are protozoans. This theory was accepted until 1850’s.

Biogenesis Proposal A German biologist, Rudolf Virchow,introduced the idea that life is only originated from preexisting life, debunking the earlier theories of spontaneous generation. Later on, scientists started using this idea to explain phenomena that hadbeen early shown with spontaneous generation. Virchow made the statement "omnis cellula ex cellula," which means that every cell comes from a cell (Amerman, 2009).

Louis Pasteur’s Experiments AfterVirchow’s proposal, the first experimental evidences were provided by Louis Pasteur. Pasteur argument was that air contained organisms invisible to the eye but that air did not produce organismsitself. To scientifically prove that, Pasteur put beef broth in some flasks and boiled the contents. After that, Pasteur sealed the flasks and let them cool. After several days, he opened the flasks andfound they were contaminated with microorganisms. Pasteur concluded that the microorganisms in the air were responsible in contaminating non-living matter (Sace, 2010). This is how biogenesis theories...