page_title: Lazzaro Spallanzani
section_title: Biography
hierarchical_section_title: Lazzaro Spallanzani / Biography
caption_attribution_description: English: Plaque dedicated to Spallanzani in Portovenere ITALY
context_page_description: Lazzaro Spallanzani was an Italian Catholic priest, biologist and physiologist who made important contributions to the experimental study of bodily functions, animal reproduction, and animal echolocation. His research on biogenesis paved the way for the downfall of spontaneous generation, a prevailing idea at the time that organisms develop from inanimate matters, though the final death blow to the idea was dealt by French scientist Louis Pasteur a century later.
  His most important works were summed up in his book Experiencias Para Servir a La Historia de La Generación De Animales y Plantas, published in 1786. Among his contributions were experimental demonstrations of fertilisation between ova and spermatozoa, and in vitro fertilisation.
context_section_description: Spallanzani was born in Scandiano in the modern province of Reggio Emilia to Gianniccolo Spallanzani and Lucia Zigliani. His father, a lawyer by profession, was not impressed with young Spallanzani who spent more time with small animals than studies. With financial support from Vallisnieri Foundation, his father enrolled him to the Jesuit Seminary at age 15. When he was asked to join the order, he refused. Persuaded by his father and with the help of Monsignor Castelvetro, the Bishop of Reggio, he studied law at the University of Bologna, which he gave up soon and turned to science. Here, his famous kinswoman, Laura Bassi, was professor of physics and it is to her influence that his scientific impulse has been usually attributed. With her he studied natural philosophy and mathematics, and gave also great attention to languages, both ancient and modern, but soon abandoned them. It took him a good friend Antonio Vallisnieri jr. to convince his father to drop law as a career and took up academics instead.
  In 1754, at the age of 25, soon after he was ordained he became professor of logic, metaphysics and Greek in the University of Reggio. In 1763, he was moved to the University of Modena, where he continued to teach with great assiduity and success, but devoted his whole leisure to natural science. There he also served as a priest of the Congregation Beata Vergine and S. Carlo. He declined many offers from other Italian universities and from St Petersburg until 1768, when he accepted the invitation of Maria Theresa to the chair of natural history in the University of Pavia, which was then being reorganized. He also became director of the museum, which he greatly enriched by the collections of his many journeys along the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. In June 1768 Spallanzani was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and in 1775 was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
  In 1785 he was invited to University of Padua, but to retain his services his sovereign doubled his salary and allowed him leave of absence for a visit to Turkey where he remained nearly a year and made many observations, among which may be noted those of a copper mine in Chalki and of an iron mine at Principi. His return home was almost a triumphal progress: at Vienna he was cordially received by Joseph II and on reaching Pavia he was met with acclamations outside the city gates by the students of the university. During the following year his students exceeded five hundred. While he was travelling in the Balkans and to Constantinople, his integrity in the management of the museum was called in question (he was accused of the theft of specimens from the University's collection to add to his own cabinet of curiosities), with letters written across Europe to damage Spallanzani's reputation. A judicial investigation speedily cleared his honour to the satisfaction of some of his accusers. But Spallanzani got his revenge on his principal accuser, a jealous colleague, by planting a fake specimen of a composite "species". When his colleague published the remarkable specimen Spallanzani revealed the joke, resulting in wide ridicule and humiliation.
  In 1796, Spallanzani received an offer for professor at the National Museum of Natural History, France in Paris, but declined due to his age. He died from bladder cancer on 12 February 1799, in Pavia. After his death, his bladder was removed for study by his colleagues, after which it was placed on public display in a museum in Pavia, where it remains to this day.
  His indefatigable exertions as a traveller, his skill and good fortune as a collector, his brilliance as a teacher and expositor, and his keenness as a controversialist no doubt aid largely in accounting for Spallanzani's exceptional fame among his contemporaries; his letters account for his close relationships with many famed scholars and philosophers, like Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, Lavoisier, and Voltaire. Yet greater qualities were by no means lacking. His life was one of incessant eager questioning of nature on all 
caption: Plaque dedicated to Spallanzani in Portovenere, Italy
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