His synthetic "zoo" also contained strikingly life-like worms, cells and other organs or organisms.
Not only do these artificial life forms grow and bear a striking resemblance to living matter but they exhibit other similarities as well. Some of these chemical "plants" will grow toward light, even as real plants do. An artificial jellyfish and a living creature of the same type both bent toward the negative pole when an electric current was passed through their solution.
THESE are interesting experiments, you may say, but what have they to do with the secrets of life? Perhaps the story of a Swiss research chemist, Ehrenfried Pfeiffer, may supply a most startling answer.
One winter day, Pfeiffer noticed the beautiful formation of frost crystals on shop windows in his town and paused to study their designs. Suddenly he discovered that the designs on the windows of a butcher shop were rough and coarse while those on a flower shop window were delicate and flowery. Was there, he asked himself, some connection between crystal growth and some mysterious life force?
He began to experiment, adding plant extracts to ordinary crystallizing salt solutions. Results were fantastic. An extract from a water lily made the salt crystals take the gracefully curved outline of a lily plant. Extract from an agava formed the characterislc spikes of that plant. Other plant extracts created patterns of their life forms to an amazing degree.
Experimenting further, Pfeiffer made two solutions, one containing extract from the seeds of a healthy pine tree, the other from one that grew crooked. Amazingly, the crystals from the straight pine solution showed beautiful sweeping curves while those from the crooked tree were irregular and broken. As a result of those experiments, European horticulturalists use many of Pfeiffer's tests in selecting healthy plant stock.
Convinced that he had discovered the presence of some vital but invisible life force controlling form, Pfeiffer began to experiment with solutions of human blood. He found that, regardless of the salts used, healthy human blood produced almost identical crystal formations. But the blood of diseased persons produced a characteristic formation. Tubercular blood, for example, makes the crystals take a pattern of crossed fibers in a Maltese Cross design. This discovery, while still in its infancy, has been successfully used in diagnosing diseases.
Out of these apparently unrelated experiments and tests has come a breath-taking hint. Perhaps there is a point, somewhere below the limits of visibility, where there is no boundary at all between living and non-living matter. Perhaps life is, after all, no more than a particular carbon compound out of the three hundred-odd thousand known today. If that is so, then the laboratory is much nearer to its goal of explaining and creating living organisms.
JUST a few years ago, schools taught that the smallest living matter was the single-celled plants and animals. Now we know that the filterable virus, an enzyme, is a living organism that contains but a single molecule. Since we know that no material can be divided smaller than that and retain its form, we can consider the virus the smallest living matter.
Experimentation with various viruses finally resulted in crystallizing a pure virus material, that which causes the plant disease known as Tobacco Mosaic. X-rays revealed the crystalline structure of the virus (as they since have of many other living materials) and thus removed what had been a barrier between crystalline forms and life forms. So, perhaps the growth of crystal pseudo-life forms is more than just an accident.
Many scientists now believe that life began as an accident. We know that all life matter is some form of carbon compound. We also know that when an electric spark is passed through any gas containing carbon, an endless variety of carbon compounds are formed as a result. There is no order or rule about the results. Anything may result.
So science believes now that perhaps, when the earth was young and hot and surrounded by a gaseous envelope resulting from the vaporized minerals, lightning played through those clouds and carbon compounds were formed. Eventually, chance produced the exact compound necessary for a life-form in an environment where it could grow and reproduce. So life began, they say, and experiments tend to strengthen that theory. That hydrocarbons are formed is evidenced by the fact that Jupiter is surrounded by an envelope of methane, the simplest hydrocarbon. Whether a more complex carbon compound like protein has yet "happened," we do not know.
Science is still pitifully far from understanding the true nature of life or from creating any actual living substance in the laboratory. But it is astoundingly close to such a discovery. The interlocking of these various phenomena is gradually leading researchers closer and closer to their goal.
A few years ago, Gurwitz the Russian experimenter, discovered that a strange radiation which he called mitogenetic rays were produced by certain living cells. By pointing the tip of one onion plant at another, he focused the invisible radiation in such a way that cell growth at the point of focus was tremendously speeded up. Later, he identified the strange radiation from many other life forms but so far the progress in tying this discovery in with our understanding of life has been pathetically slow.
But the time is rapidly passing when scientists dare say that life cannot be created synthetically. Today, many of them feel that it is only a matter of time until test tube life is a reality.
Who knows but what some day a race of supermen may come—not from the laboratory of the geneticist but out of the test tubes and retorts of chemistry?
