274 W H AT I S LIFE 



Biophysics has been engaged for some years in experi- 

 mentation on living matter, especially in connection 

 with cancer research, and particularly on the effects 

 of various rays on living matter. Thus, there is no 

 difficulty in causing the destruction of cancer cells — 

 where they are accessible to treatment — by X-rays 

 or by radium rays; the difficulty consists in not also 

 causing injury or death to normal cells. Of the fact 

 of the difficulty of research on living matter there is 

 no doubt. But why living matter should behave so 

 utterly unlike non-living matter, except non-informa- 

 tvely to assign "the state of living" as the cause, no 

 biophysicist has attempted to say; and there then 

 has been no clue to the cause of the peculiar dif- 

 ficulties of research on living matter. 



The first of these is the difficulty that all experi- 

 menters on protoplasm have recognized, the diffi- 

 culty, namely, of keeping living matter alive under 

 experimentation. 



"Following life in creatures we dissect, 

 We lose it, in the moment we detect." 



The cause of this difficulty is found in the fact 

 (asserted by theory) that living matter is a dual sys- 

 tem, the constituent systems of which are in a state 

 of delicate equilibrium, which equilibrium is easily 

 upset. Any attack upon the dual system that de- 

 stroijs the equilibrium to a degree that recovery of 



