THE INTERPRETATION OF LIFE 377 



It seems therefore that the endeavour of biology in this 

 connection should be to renew these conditions and to place 

 in them the material of which we see life to be composed, so 

 that the vital synthesis should be complete. To do this may 

 or may not be beyond the power of biology and the sciences 

 it may summon to its aid but it is only by attempting it that 

 biology can hope to pierce the enigma of the state of life. 



The work is of enormous difficulty. It has been proved 

 by the experiments of Pasteur that it is useless to provide a 

 purely nutritional medium and to wait for life to appear in 

 it, because whenever the sterilisation has been impeccably 

 performed no life appears. The gelatin or other substance 

 extracted from dead animals does not itself give birth to life 

 even when placed in the thermal conditions favourable to 

 germination. The process of life origination appears to be far 

 more complex and to demand the co-operation of forces that are 

 not present in a test tube filled with sterilised solution of an 

 organic substance. 



It has been held with some show of reason, although without 

 any possibility of proof, that the evolution of life was a process 

 occupying an enormous space of time : consequently that it 

 is vain to attempt to make plasm in a few days or weeks 

 which nature employed millions of years to manufacture. 

 Inquirers, however, have not always been deterred by these 

 considerations from attempting to find a short cut to the 

 process and during the last half-century not a few attempts 

 have been made to construct life out of dead matter. These 

 essays are mainly of interest because they tend to focus research 

 into channels where it might be susceptible of leading to results. 

 Let us briefly consider the most recent. 



J. B. Burke, in 1905, claimed that by the action of radium 

 in a culture medium he produced objects which were not unlike 

 ordinary bacilli of the same dimensions. The process consisted 

 in mixing radium salts with gelatin, then sterilising at 130 to 

 140 C. during half an hour. Objects gradually appeared in 

 this medium varying in size from 3 microns to mere specks when 

 seen under a 1/12 inch power. On the borderland apparently 

 between crystals and bacteria, it is said that they developed 

 nuclei after six or seven days, that they ceased to grow and 

 then segregated and multiplied, becoming visible to the unaided 



