What was a significant outcome of Pasteur's experiment?

Louis Pasteur's experiments, particularly the swan-neck flask experiment, played a crucial role in rejecting the theory of spontaneous generation, which was the idea that life could arise spontaneously from non-life. In his experiments, Pasteur showed that when air could access a nutrient broth in a flask but was prevented from introducing contaminants (such as dust or microorganisms), no microbial growth occurred. This demonstrated that living organisms (specifically microbes) did not spontaneously generate in the broth, but rather came from pre-existing microorganisms in the environment.

By showing that microbial life would only develop when the broth was exposed to existing microbes from the air, Pasteur provided strong evidence against the idea of spontaneous generation. This was a pivotal moment in biology, as it changed the understanding of how life arises and contributed to the development of microbiology as a science focused on the study of microorganisms and their role in various biological processes.