Question

What did Pasteur prove when he showed that a cotton plug that had filtered air would trigger microbial growth when transferred to a sterile medium? What argument made previously was he addressing?

Answer 1

Ans: Loius Pasteur demonstrated that if he filtered air through cotton and that the same cotton was put in a sterile medium, he could get microbes to grow. The cotton was shown to have spores. This showed that there are microorganims in the air than can contaminate sterile medium. This also indicated that these microbes were hard to kill and that sterilization must be go through to get rid of them.

Before Pasteur's experiment people believed that living organisms develop from nonliving matter; and this theory was called the theory of spontaneous generation and after the cotton plug experiment this theroy was disproved and Pasteur suggested that living organisms arises from the living organisms only.