Hydrothermal Organic Synthesis Experiments

The serious scientific debate about spontaneous generation which raged for centuries reached a climax in the nineteenth century with the work of Spallanzani, Schwann, Tyndall, and Pasteur. These investigators demonstrated that spontaneous generation from dead organic matter does not occur (see reviews by Conant, 1953 and Kenyon and Steinman, 1969). Although no aspects of these experiments addressed the issue of whether organic compounds could be synthesized abiotically, the impact of the experiments was great enough to cause many investigators to assume that life and its organic compounds were somehow fundamentally different than inorganic compounds.