Life: Its Nature and Origin 43 



processes such as muscle contraction? Szent-Gyorgi offered strong 

 evidence that the chemical energy produced in the cell can be 

 converted into electromagnetic energy, which can be used for work 

 and which also can produce work (for example, the clumping of 

 molecules in muscle) elsewhere than at the site of production. He 

 pointed out, however, that the only known basis of such electronic 

 conversion is through certain phenomena of electron excitation 

 called phosphorescence. This phosphorescence does not occur in 

 ordinary fluid water, in which the water molecules are moving at 

 random, but can occur in appreciable amounts in ice, which is a 

 crystal having a highly organized and non-random arrangement of 

 the water molecules. On this basis Szent-Gyorgi postulated that the 

 water molecules in living systems are not randomized, but are 

 highly organized and oriented. 



He suggested that further study of three factors will contribute 

 greatly to our understanding of biological reactions: water struc- 

 tures, the electromagnetic field, and forms of electron excitation 

 made possible by water structure. The resultant findings might aid 

 in explaining the molecular clumping which forms structures of the 

 spindle at cell division, the gathering and organizing of material 

 to duplicate macromolecules, and other cellular puzzles. 



Our idealized cell has one additional property of great impor- 

 tance. With only minor and infrequent exceptions, when the cell 

 divides it produces daughter cells exactly like the parent cell, gen- 

 eration after generation. This is borne out by the exactness with 

 which progeny resemble their parents through all classes of living 

 things. Daughter amoebae look like the parent amoeba, daughter 

 oaks like parent oaks. It seems established beyond all doubt that 

 the macromolecules of the nucleus forming the chromosomes ( chiefly 

 DNA and the protamines) are the structures responsible for this 

 continuity of similarity and, therefore, that these molecular struc- 

 tures are duplicated with extreme accuracy during cell division. 

 This topic forms the subject of the next chapter. 



At this point we can visualize some of the properties and habits 

 of the cell, the unit of life. The cell consists of many kinds of 

 molecules, some of them extremely complex, held together in an 

 aqueous colloidal gel, having at least some properties suggestive 

 of a crystalline state, and separated from the external environment 

 by an enveloping membrane which is essentially the outside layer 

 of the gel. The whole is essentially a multiplicity of tiny molecular 

 machines so organized that they proceed radially from the edge of 



