The origin of life: experiments with superheated saline solutions in hermetically sealed vessels.

  • Bastian, H. Charlton.
Date:
1913
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The origin of life: experiments with superheated saline solutions in hermetically sealed vessels. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

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    be so very unorthodox—especially as the results of the experiments recorded would still probably be held to be absolutely at variance with the everyday procedures of bacteriologists. A distinguished physiologist indeed recently suggested to me as an a priori objec- tion to my results that, if true, the whole of modern bacteriology, with its isolation of different forms of bacteria in pure cultivation, must go by the board, since no method of sterilisation could be held to prevent the development of micro-organisms spontaneously diflfering from those which had been placed in any given cultivating medium by inoculation. But this is a mistake, as I have elsewhere pointed out. The different results in the two cases are entirely due to difference of aim and procedure. The bacteriologist wishes to make doubly sure that the media he uses will no longer contain hving micro- organisms or their germs. Therefore he superheats them to a degree sufficient to destroy what I may call the germinality ot the fluids, while leaving such fluids still capable of nourishing the organisms introduced by inoculation. He heats them, therefore, two or three times to ioo° C. or else once to 130° C, that is to a temperature far higher than would be needed to kill any organisms that could possibly be found in his tubes, and looking to the organic nature of his media, which would probably be sufficient to destroy their germinality. My objects are, of course, quite different. What I try to do is, while heating the fluids and vessels sufficiently to kill all pre-existing living things, not unnecessarily to degrade or break up the colloidal compounds contained in the solutions (though such as exist in my saline solutions seem to resist much higher degrees of heat than those that are to be found in organic solutions); and then, after a time, to examine very carefully the minute and unobtrusive deposits that are to be found In the vessels. For in these high-temperature experi- ments there Is never the production of general turbidity. The organisms are always comparatively scarce and to be found only at the bottom of the vessel.' ' In regard to the media of the bacteriologist there are two points which have perhaps hitherto been insufficiently considered in this relation :