Lazzaro Spallanzani

Lazzaro Spallanzani, an Italian Catholic priest often called Abbé Spallanzani, made significant experimental advances in understanding bodily functions, animal reproduction, and echolocation. His research on biogenesis helped erode belief in spontaneous generation, though Louis Pasteur would later deliver the final refutation. He summarized his key findings in his 1785 book *Expériences pour servir a l'histoire de la génération des animaux et des plantes*, which included demonstrations of fertilization between egg and sperm, as well as in vitro fertilization.

Spallanzani was born in Scandiano, in what is now Reggio Emilia province, to Gianniccolo Spallanzani and Lucia Zigliani. His father, a lawyer, was disappointed that the boy preferred small animals to his studies. At 15, his father used support from the Vallisnieri Foundation to enroll him in a Jesuit seminary. Spallanzani declined the invitation to join the order. With his father’s persuasion and help from Monsignor Castelvetro, the Bishop of Reggio, he began studying law at the University of Bologna but soon switched to science. His relative Laura Bassi, a physics professor there, is usually credited with inspiring his scientific turn. He studied natural philosophy and mathematics with her, and also spent time on ancient and modern languages, though he quickly abandoned them. His friend Antonio Vallisnieri Jr. finally convinced his father to let him drop law for an academic path.

In 1754, at age 25 and shortly after being ordained, Spallanzani became professor of logic, metaphysics, and Greek at the University of Reggio. In 1763 he moved to the University of Modena, where he taught diligently and devoted all his free time to natural science. He also served as a priest for the Congregation Beata Vergine and S. Carlo. He turned down offers from other Italian universities and from St. Petersburg until 1768, when he accepted Maria Theresa’s invitation to the chair of natural history at the University of Pavia, then being reorganized. He also became director of the museum, enriching it with collections from his many journeys along the Mediterranean. In June 1768 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and in 1775 a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

In 1785 he was invited to the University of Padua. To keep him, his sovereign doubled his salary and granted him leave to visit Turkey, where he spent nearly a year making observations, including of a copper mine on Chalki and an iron mine at Principi. His return was nearly a triumph: in Vienna, Joseph II received him warmly, and students at Pavia greeted him with acclamations outside the city gates. The following year, his students numbered over five hundred. While traveling in the Balkans and Constantinople, his management of the museum was questioned—he was accused of stealing specimens for his own collection. A judicial investigation cleared his honor to the satisfaction of some accusers. Spallanzani took revenge on his main accuser, Giovanni Antonio Scopoli, by creating a fake specimen of a new “species.” When Scopoli published it, Spallanzani revealed the joke, causing widespread ridicule.

In 1796 he declined an offer to become a professor at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, citing his age. He died of bladder cancer on 12 February 1799 in Pavia. After his death, his colleagues removed his bladder for study, and it was later placed on public display in a Pavia museum, where it remains. Spallanzani was known among his contemporaries as an avid traveler, collector, and teacher who embraced controversial ideas. His letters show close ties with scholars such as Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, Lavoisier, and Voltaire. Besides animal biology and physiology, his work laid foundations for modern volcanology and meteorology, and he clarified the mechanics of stone skipping, disproving the earlier idea that it was due to water’s elasticity.

Spallanzani’s first scientific work, in 1765, was *Saggio di osservazioni microscopiche concernenti il sistema della generazione de' signori di Needham, e Buffon*, the first systematic rebuttal of spontaneous generation. Using microscopes, proponents like Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, Buffon, and John Needham had argued that a life-generating force in certain inorganic matter caused living microbes to arise given time. Spallanzani’s experiments showed this was not an inherent property of matter, since an hour of boiling destroyed it.