ATTEMPTS AT THE FORMULATION OF SOME 

 BASIC BIOCHEMICAL QUESTIONS 



FRITZ LIPMANN, Biochemical Research Laboratory, Massachusetts 

 General Hospital and the Department of Biological Chemistry, Harvard Medical 



School, Boston, Massachusetts 



The fogginess in which tJie physical-chemical aspects of the 

 inner working of the living organisms had in the past been 

 shrouded, inevitably invited mystification of one kind or another. 

 In counterreaction, the past generation of biochemists was 

 almost religiously concerned with the task of demystifying life. 

 Through their pioneering, the fog lifted during the twenties and 

 thirties. But now we witness the development of a new phase, 

 in which the hesitant, skeptical, and largely analytical approach 

 is being discarded. The depth to which the understanding of 

 organismic methodology has reached demands reorientation. 

 At this stage it seems most important to ask the right questions. 

 I will not attempt much more than to try to raise a few such 

 relatively naive questions and even these in not too explicit a 

 manner. 



The approach toward clarification appears to be most 

 hopeful by way of defining those distinctive attributes of the 

 living state which have been thought to indicate a novel and 

 specifically "living" phenomenon. We will first consider 

 briefly the energy problem, which is relatively the farthest ad- 

 vanced, and then try problems specifically related to duplication. 



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