There are many theories based on the unknown origin of microorganisms and disease. Since Earth had been a molten fireball, unable to support any life billions of years ago, the theory of microorganism coming to us from other planets, or extra-terrestrial theories were very strongly supported. But, after actually exposing bacteria to conditions outside of the earth’s atmosphere and concluding that there should have been some evidence in the atmosphere of microorganisms.
Scientists concluded that there was some way the Earth had produced life out of the toxic hell it had originated from. Their first theory was that life on earth had been grown out of non-life through spontaneous generation. This would be disproved in the late 1800’s by French microbiologist Louis Pasteur. Now the whole theory of spontaneous generation was disproved and all life was said to have a predecessor that was once living.
Obviously, there was a huge gap left in the theory. If Earth was completely non-organic, then no “parent” life could have ever been formed. In the early 1900’s A. I. Oparin and J. B. S. Haldane from Europe both separately devised the theory of chemical or prebiotic evolution, stating that certain chemicals interacting with each other could combine to form atoms, which will build into molecules, and so forth until an organism is created. These were how the first bacteria were created. These bacteria were completely harmless, but soon had gone through mutations that made them learn to invade free-living cells, where the invasion causes what we know as disease.
Scientists wanted to learn how to combat this disease, and found out that certain substances bacteria uses to combat with other bacteria could be used to initially destroy them with no impact on the body. These were called antibiotics. Antibiotics were first “invented” in 1929 (see timeline) by an ambitious young scientist named Rene Dubos, who...