The Spontaneous Generation Controversy from Descartes to Oparin

One of the most significant controversies in the history of biology is that dealing with the theories of the origin of life.Do all organisms arise from organisms or can life be generated spontaneously?These questions have been asked for centuries.Involving, as they do, religious and metaphysical beliefs, the resultant arguments have been heated and prolonged.Professor Farley disputes the usual idea that the debate in England, France, and Germany declined from the seventeenth century onwards, and he contends with forceful argument and data that it waxed and waned in relationship to relevant current biological theories, and to the philosophical, religious, and, more recently, the political climate.Pasteur's death knell is the tradi- tional end of the controversy, but Farley claims that in fact the work of the biochemist Oparin in the 1930s was responsible.His book is an important contribution to the history of biology, microbiology, medicine, parasitology, virology, and biochemistry and will, therefore, be in wide demand.JUNE GOODFIELD, Playing God.Genetic engineering and the manipulation of life,