The Laramie Republican

WILL WE MAKE LIFE?

THE NEW CENTURY MAY REVEAL THIS MARVEL.

Prying Into the Arch-Secret of Dame Nature's Laboratory - A Physiologist Who Believes that the Problem Will Some Day Be Solved.

The famous Professor Haeckel says that man will some day learn how to make life—that he will know how "to produce a living substance by artificial processes." Perhaps the new century may hold in reserve this greatest marvel, which will enable the physiological chemist to assume the role of a creator. It may be only in a small way, but it will be wonderful none the less. After all, the problem is simply to create a bit of protoplasm, which is the basis of all life, the clay of the potter—the substance, in short, out of which all animals and plants are built up. And surely that ought not to be so very difficult, considering what very ordinary stuff protoplasm is. Take a spoonful of the white of an egg, and you have it, practically. White of egg, in fact, is nearly pure protoplasm.

The composition of protoplasm being absolutely known, the chemist has no great trouble in imitating it. So many parts of oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and carbon are put together, and there you are.

Artificial protoplasm has been made of albuminous substances and oils, and the product has actually had a movement of its own simulating life; but the movement was due merely to chemical causes. Viewed under the microscope, the stuff had exactly the same apparent structure as protoplasm, but there was no life in it, and no reproductive principle. The difference between a thing living and a thing dead is not a matter of structure or chemical composition—the two may be exactly the same in both respects—but in the ability which the living thing has to renew its own cells and propagate fresh ones. Blood taken out of the veins of a living animal is the same as the blood that remains in the veins, but the latter is continually developing new corpuscles—is alive, in other words—while the former does nothing of the kind. Why is it so? In the answer to that question lies the arch-secret of Dame Nature's laboratory. It has never been plausibly guessed at as yet, but there is no good reason for taking it for granted that it will never be found out. Prof. Haeckel calls attention to the fact that in trying to create life man is only making an effort to accomplish what the plants in anybody's garden are doing all the time. They take so many parts of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen and convert them into protoplasms, the living substance. Science can combine these elements just as nature does, the proportions being exactly known, but not yet so as to produce life. "But I believe firmly," says the great physiologist, "that the problem will some day be solved, and the artificial production of life become an accomplished fact."

If a drop of blood be drawn by pricking one's finger and viewed under a high microscopic power there will be seen, among numerous little disc-shaped bodies which float in it and give it its red color, a comparatively smaller number of somewhat larger colorless bodies of irregular shape. If the drop be kept at the temperature of living blood these colorless corpuscles will be seen to exhibit a marvelous activity, changing their forms with great rapidity, drawing in and thrusting out prolongations of their substance, and creeping about as if they were independent organisms. Each is a tiny mass of protoplasm, and has a nucleus of its own. It is a structural unit of the human being taking shape as an aggregation of such corpuscles. It is the same way with all other animals, though they are built up on different structural forms, and some, like the amoeba, are so low down in the scale of creation as to consist of but one such cell. A plant is able to take carbolic acid, water, and nitrogenous salts, and convert them into protoplasm. That is the way in which vegetable organisms grow. An animal cannot do this, and so would starve in the presence of any quantity of such raw materials.—Philadelphia Times.