The Impact of Microorganisms on Human Affairs

The Impact of Microorganisms on Human Affairs What is microbiology? Microbiology is the study of microorganisms or microbes. The word micro means small in Greek, implying that microbes are very minute or small life forms that cannot be seen with just the naked eye. One would need a microscope to see these small life forms. Microbes are everywhere and have a large impact on the world. It all started when one of the most important discoveries in history was made in 1665. Englishman, Robert Hooke discovered “little boxes” or “cells” in a slice of cork through the microscope and explained that these were life’s smallest structural unit (Tortora et al, 2010). This event marked the beginning of the cell theory, that all living things are composed of cells. As expected in the scientific world, a new finding leads to a cascade of experiments to expand on the newly discovered facts. This was shown when Anton Van Leeuwenhoek made the first observation of live microbes though a microscope that he designed himself. Van Leeuwenhoek used rain water, his feces, and his teeth scrapings to make observations from the microbes. For a few years after Van Leeuwenhoek’s discoveries the majority of the world believed that microorganisms spontaneously generated, which means that life forms came from nonliving matter such as toads and mice (Tortora et al, 2010). It was not until the discoveries of Louis Pasteur in 1861 that the theory of spontaneous generation was challenged and the call theory was confirmed. Pasteur resolved this issue by creating experiments demonstrating that microbes are present in the air and can contaminate sterile solutions, but the air itself cannot create microbes. The experiments contained beef broth in several flasks. Some were sealed after being boiled and the rest were kept open after they were boiled. The flasks that were kept open in the air accumulated microbes whereas the flasks that were sealed did not. Pasteur then followed up his first experiment by

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