"Generation is the story of the exciting, all but forgotten decade when four men - Jan Swammerdam, the son of a Protestant apothecary; Nils Stensen (also known as Steno), a Danish anatomist who first discovered the human tear duct; Reinier de Graaf, the attractive and brilliant son of a rich and successful Catholic architect; and Antoni Leeuwenhoek, a self-taught draper - dared to challenge thousands of years of orthodox thinking about where life comes from. By meticulous experimentation, dissection, and observation with the newly invented microscope, they showed that like breeds like, that all animals come from an egg, and that there are millions of tiny, wriggling "eels" in semen. At last, the building blocks were in place - although, in one of the great ironies of science, it would be another 150 years before someone finally put all the pieces together to explain how babies are born." "Including previously untranslated documents, Generation interweaves the personal stories of these scientists against the backdrop of the Dutch "Golden Age.""--BOOK JACKET.