Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 61, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 March 1915 — STUDYING ORIGIN OF LIFE [ARTICLE]

STUDYING ORIGIN OF LIFE

Scientists of Many Kinds Have Found This One of Most Fascinating of r*rODlcTD*> The search for the elixir of youth passed away with the age of fable; the search for the secret of life goes on with ever-increasing persistence The Harvard professor who has just "surprised” a Baltimore audience with atheory on the subject, is only one of a host. For every biologist and physiologist today the problem looms large. Chemists are thinking of it. Even the physicists have it on their mind. To all of them it looks simple, and yet is enormously complex. Given such substances as oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulphur and what not in the Inanimate world, how does it happen that when they come together under organic conditions life should result? Do they "get busy” on their own initiative, or does a so-called “vital energy,” different from physical energy, intervene to make them alive? Is it their partnership that gives r|se to life, or do they already live, if with a lower order of vitality, in advance of the combination? To questions like these several sorts of scientists are trying to give answers, and they have more than one method. One is to see the thing out, the other is to reason it out. The empiricists bring their microscopes to bear on the organic cell with keen attention to parts and workings. They insist on studying the riddle where it shows itself; they believe that where organic conditions prevail vital phenomena must appear; many of them even hold, with Schaefer, that it will be possible to "synthesize” in the laboratory. The rationalists, on the other hand, despairing of aid from the microscope, are content to find out where life comes from. And even here two schools of thought have taken the royal road. By the one it is maintained that life does not start up suddenly in the living body, but is more or less "latent" in all matter. That hypothesis Is implicit in the hylozoism of the ancient Greeks; It has been expanded in modern Germany by the Nagelis and the Haeckels; it shows Itself once more in the view represented by Professor Henderson at Baltimore. Then there is the cosmic theory championed by Arrhenius. In his cosmogony the vital germ which started organic evolution came to us from other worlds, er from the spaces between, wafted thence to the earth by the impelling power of solar light. -- -x