Francesco Redi
Francesco Redi was an Italian physician, naturalist, biologist and poet. He is referred to as the "founder of experimental biology", and as the "father of modern parasitology". He was the first person to challenge the theory of spontaneous generation by demonstrating that maggots come from eggs of flies.
Redi believed that God had been the sole creator of organisms and living beings. As he put it in his own words: "I am going to express my conviction that the earth, having given birth to the first plants and animals in the beginning by order of the Supreme and Almighty Creator, has never produced any kind of plants or animals, whether they are perfect or imperfect, and everything that we know that in past or present times it has been produced, came only from the true seeds of the plants and animals themselves, which therefore, through their own means, preserved their species".
A collection of his poems first published in 1685, Bacco in Toscana ("Bacchus in Tuscany") is considered among the finest works of 17th-century Italian poetry, and for which the Grand Duke Cosimo III gave him a medal of honor.