Francesco Redi was born in Arezzo, Tuscany. Credited with the birth of modern experimentation he applied his enquiring, deductive mind and astute powers of observation to designing controlled experiments, the first of their type ever recorded. One magnificently contrived series of investigations led to the disproof of the centuries-old belief in spontaneous generation. Another, in what he called "unmasking of untruth," he discovered how vipers produce venom and inject it into their prey, and determined the venom's clotting effect on the the victim's blood. His ingenuity in designing these experiments has been compared to that of Louis Pasteur two hundred years later. His command of the written word also gained him fame in the literary world, primarily with his long poem published in 1685,Bacco in Toscana, (Bacchus in Tuscany).

Redi was born to Cecelia de'Ghinci and Gregorio Redi, a family of nobility. His father was physician to the...