Pre-existing Life

Pre-existing Life

When Geppeto is just finishing the construction of Pinocchio, he turns his back on the puppet and is promptly sent flying by a well-placed kick. At that instant the carpenter’s friend arrives and asks him what he is doing sprawled on the floor.

“I am teaching,” Gepetto replies with dignity, “the alphabet to the ants”.

This seemed to Ellie extremely witty, and she delighted in recounting it to her friends. But each time she quoted it there was an unspoken question lingering at the edge of her consciousness: Could you teach the alphabet to the ants? And would you want to? Down there with hundreds of scurrying insects who might crawl all over your skin, or even sting you? What could ants know, anyway?

Leeuwenhoek’s microscope evolved from the magnifying glasses employed by drapers to examine the quality of cloth. With it the scientist discovered a universe in a drop of water: the microbes, which he described as “animalcules” and thought “cute”.

Could you teach the alphabet to the ants? (Quotations from Megan Jorgensen). Image: © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

Huygens had contributed to the design of the first microscopes and himself made many discoveries with them.

Leeuwenhoek and Huygens were among the first people ever to see human sperm cells, a prerequisite for understanding human reproduction. To explain how microorganisms slowly develop in water previously sterilized by boiling, Huygens proposed that they were small enough to float through the air and reproduced on alighting in water. Thus he established an alternative to spontaneous generation – the notion that life could rise, in fermenting grape juice or rotting meat, entirely independent of pre-existing life. It was not until the time of Louis Pasteur, two centuries later, that Huygens’ speculation was proved correct. The Viking search for life on Mars can be traced in more ways than one back to Leeuwenhoek and Huygens. They are also the grandfathers of the germ theory of disease, and therefore of much of modern medicine. But they had no practical motives in mind. They were merely tinkering in a technological society.