Remember a story for me

[Were-Sandwich]

Once, when I was younger, I remember watching an episode of "What the Victorians did for us", one of Adam Hart Davis's seemingly endless stream of historical documentaries. He has discussing the Victorian's attitude to life and death.

I remember it featured these things they fitted to coffins so if you were buried alive, you could remotely wave a little flag above your grave so people could dig you out.

But the one I'm tryig to remember more about, so I can look it up on the 'net, is the story of the scientist who created life, rather serendipitiously, when performing some experiment or other on chemical reactions, was observing the reaction on a slide under a microscope, when all of a sudden he observed completely unknown (this was post-Pasteur, I think, so he would have recongised germs) form of life-form on the slide, that hadn't been there when he started the experiment. He had created life.

Of course, there's no proof of this, and scientists still can't come up with an observation, and I'd like to read up on it to see if anyone has resolved it yet.


But herein lies in the rub: I can't remember the scientists name. Can anyone else tell me?

[Rykaj]

Well I'm sure this isn't who you meant but this guy did serendipitously create 'life'. And he's post-Pasteur hehe!

This guy, in this article

[phoenixineohp]

The original discovery of mold and penicillin? It rings something of a bell.

And bells and flags were apparently what was used in the graveyards. Handy since they weren't too good at identifying coma victims. Though they also took to rearranging the bones, thinking that a vampire would then not be able to rise.

[Pyro]

Those silly Victorians with their grave bells and tacky houses. I mean really, it's frilly. On the guy who discovered life, I have no idea. I didn't even know someone could create life now, much less then.

[phoenixineohp]

They can't and couldn't. You can see something you couldn't see before though.

And there are 6 houses on my street that are being built just like that one. One word. Baseballs.

[Pyrian]

Post-Pasteur? Pasteur was the first one to demonstrate that micro-organisms don't spontaneously generate from sterile biologic material - up until then this point was very much in contention. Pre-Pasteur there are any number of experiments supposedly showing abiogenesis, but the procedures they used essentially guaranteed the contamination of the sample. If anybody did that experiment post-Pasteur and showed evidence of abiogenesis (and I'm sure it has happened at least to students!) the natural conclusion is that the sample was contaminated - very, very easy to happen with bacteria! The experiment would have to be replicable to have any credibility. Otherwise, it's just some guy who screwed up.

[Totally Guy]

Those silly Victorians with their grave bells and tacky houses. I mean really, it's frilly. On the guy who discovered life, I have no idea. I didn't even know someone could create life now, much less then.

That house is looks very much like an American style architecture... hang on! Do you call that era Victorian as well? I thought it was just us that called it that.

[Were-Sandwich]

The original discovery of mold and penicillin? It rings something of a bell.

And bells and flags were apparently what was used in the graveyards. Handy since they weren't too good at identifying coma victims. Though they also took to rearranging the bones, thinking that a vampire would then not be able to rise.

nah, wasn't Fleming, I'd have recongised that straight away, anyway, that was much later, in the '30s. *Is studying Medicine Through Time for history GCSE*

[Telonius]

Craig Venter, maybe?

(Full disclosure, I work for a scientific journal that's published some of his work).

[Serpentine]

I know this story, but i seem to have misplaced all my "interesting stuff" books...
If I recall correctly, though, he left pretty detailed notes, and people repeating his experiment came up with nothing. I think it's generally accepted that it was probably just a contaminated sample...