1. Conant, J. B. (Ed.) (1957). Harvard case histories in experimental science (Vol. 2). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (The Harvard Cast Histories have been extremely useful in teaching the nature of science by selecting a series of controversies in the physical and life sciences. The cases include explanatory material setting the context (mostly intellectual rather than social or political) in which the controversy took place with extended excerpts from the writings of the scientists involved. This approach provides students with the chance to learn how to read and analyze material from primary sources as well as understand the scientific issues of earlier times in their own terms. Cases range from the verthrow of the phlogiston theory by Lavoisier’s oxygen theory, to the nature of plant photosynthesis in the work of Joseph Priestly and others in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and Pasteur’s and John Tyndall’s work on spontaneous generation in the 1860s and 1870s.).
2. Geison, G. L. (1995) The Private Science of Louis Pasteur. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (One of the most recent, and controversial biographies of Pasteur, because it questions some of the most cherished myths about Pasteur as a scientist), Geison’s book provides ample evidence of Pasteur’s political and religious biases in the spontaneous generation controversy. The specific Pasteur-Pouchet controversy has been summarized in Garland E. Allen, “That Louis Pasteur Disproved Spontaneous Generation on the Basis of Scientific Objectivity,” in Kostas Kampourakis (ed) Myths in Science Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015, pp ____.).
3. Farley, J. (1977). The spontaneous generation controversy from Descartes to Oparin. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. (This book is a very readable introduction to the history of ideas of spontaneous generation from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. It includes discussions of Spallanzani, Redi and Pasteur-Pouchet.).
4. Grinnell, F. (1987). The scientific attitude. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. (Written by a practicing scientist for undergraduates and graduate students in science, this book is a simple, straightforward introduction to many aspects of science as a process. Topics include problems of observation, experimental design and interpretation, science as a collective activity and “thought-style,” how scientific ideas are perpetuated and become entrenched.).
5. Kuhn, T. S. (2012) The structure of scientific revolutions (4th ed.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (This edition contains revisions and was published on the 50th anniversary of the original appearance of the book in 1962. Kuhn’s work has had a powerful effect on scientists, historians and philosophers of science alike, as well as in realms of social science and literary studies. In this book, Kuhn lays out his concepts of paradigm, normal science, puzzle-solving, anomalies and describes the development of science as a series of paradigm replacements, (shifts) or what he calls “scientific revolutions.”).