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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    This, then, IS the medium in which changes of a fermenta- tive order seem to be brought about under the long-continued influence of suitable temperatures or that of sunlight The changes are clearly of a fermentative order when we have to do with many organic infusions ; though the phenomena are less obviously of this kind after such solutions have been subjected to very high temperatures, or when we have to do with saline colloidal solutions such as have been used in our experiments. In these latter cases organisms are met with only in small quantities, mixed with some sedimentary matter. These are not active, but slow and smouldering fermentations. In all such changes, as in most vital pro- cesses, destructive and constructive reactions are found to be associated. Concerning such constructive processes of a vital order, we have only to remember, as Professor Starling reminds us, that every day, in all of us, the lifeless material of the food was being taken up and formed into the living constituents of our own bodies.' But just as all fermentations are now regarded as imme- diately due to enzymes or chemical ferments (rather than to the vital ferments of Pasteur), so are almost all the elementary processes taking place in living things now being regarded as partaking of the nature of fermentations. In both, as just stated, there is the same kind of association of destructive and constructive chemical changes. It has been shown by G. Bertrand that even for the process of respiration a ferment (oxydase) is necessary, to seize the oxygen in the lungs, and hand it over to the red corpuscles of the blood. It thus seems legitimate to say, as Carl Snyder does in his Neiu Conceptions in Science (1903, p. 234): In brief, for every vital function a ferment. That is the latest word of biological chemistry. In broader terms, the sum of activities we coUec- ' Med.-Chir. Trans., Vol. XC, 1907, p. 536.