Who discovered that living things could come from non living things?

Answer 1

There have been multiple individuals who have proposed and refined the hypothesis of abiogenesis (the creation of living organisms from nonliving materials). Some of the big names include the proposal by Charles Darwin (as a sideline to his more famous Theory of Evolution), Alexander Oparin and JBS Haldane, all of whom were involved in the abstract logical underpinnings of the hypothesis. A great experiment in which the hypothesis was given some solid data is the famous Miller-Urey Experiment, during which the scientists reconstructed the "primordial soup", zapped it with lightning and observed the spontaneous formation of amino acids that could self-assemble into protein chains.

However, this has yet to be substantiated scientifically - it is primarily hypothetical and based in logical reasoning. There are numerous scientists around the world working to provide scientific data for this hypothesis.

Answer 2

Louis Pasteur is credited with discovering that living things could not spontaneously generate from non-living matter through his experiments on spontaneous generation in the mid-19th century. His work led to the development of the germ theory of disease and revolutionized the fields of microbiology and medicine.