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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    sample from the tube has been made into a suitable thoroughly sterilised solution of a kind likely to favour their growth and multiplication. The solution I have used for this purpose has been one containing ten grains of neutral ammonium tartrate and three of sodium phosphate to each ounce of distilled water. Such a solution, after it has been well boiled or superheated, favours the growth of such organisms, though it never engenders them. The mode of testing a sample is, there- fore, quite simple. Four or five minims of the experimental solution with its deposit are dropped into a thoroughly sterilised two-ounce flask containing some of the recently reboiled test solution.^ The flask is closed with a freshly boiled india-rubber stopper, and is then left in a warm chamber for from two to ten days or longer. If Bacteria are plentiful, such a test solution will become more or less turbid in the course of from two to three days. Where Bacteria are less abundant, or less prone to multiply in the solution, the fluid often does not become turbid, but a sediment may distinctly increase in the course of from four to eight days. When a portion of this is removed by a pipette, it will be found to be composed of aggregates of Bacilli, or Bacilli and Cocci, mixed with Torulas, such as are shown in Plates 1-5, Figs. 6, 7, 18, 24, 28. At other times, when there have been no Bacteria, only Moulds may be seen slowly developing at the bottom of the flask, and after a time rising to the surface and developing into distinct specimens of Penicillium with crowds of acrospores, as in Plates 3, 4, Figs. 19, 22 ; while, occasionally, where the organisms have been scarce, no result has followed from such inoculations. ' The flasks were sterilised by keeping them in a steriliser such as is used for surgical instruments, or else by putting them into an oven In either case they were allowed to remain for over an hour, and the heat was sufficient to render cotton-wool slightly brown.