George Wald, Nobel Laureate in Medicine and Physiology, in 1954, wrote in Scientific American:
"The reasonable view was to believe in spontaneous generation.."
("The Origin of Life" 1954 The Scientific American)
Wald was a staunch atheist at the time.
In 1980's, Wald became a theist:
"It has occurred to me lately-I must confess with some shock at first to my scientific sensibilities-that both questions might be brought into some degree of congruence. This is with the assumption that Mind, rather than emerging as a late outgrowth in the evolution of life, has always existed as the matrix, the source and condition of physical reality-that the stuff of which physical reality is composed is mind-stuff. It is Mind that has composed a physical universe that breeds life, and so eventually evolves creatures that know and create."