TISSUE-CULTURE IN VITRO IO3 



breaking on a smooth sandy beach. The meetings, the bumps, 

 the flights, the struggles often ending in absorption, the 

 envelopment of one by the other, are all portrayed. We 

 observe, in short, at a scale of a thousandth of a millimetre, 

 all that we are accustomed to see every day around us. 



It is in this sense that one can speak of 'sociology', even 

 though the strict meaning of the word is perhaps different. 

 But I cannot think of any other to replace it adequately. 



These observations which enable us to witness the incessant 

 activities of the cells and to assist like an indiscreet onlooker 

 at their birth, nourishment, battles, and death, form a new 

 science of which great things can be expected. 



Not only can we contemplate them alive and magnified 

 thousands of times on the screen, but we dispose, thanks to the 

 cinematographic technique, of the apparently superhuman 

 power of contracting their time in comparison to ours. Like 

 the character in a remarkable story by Wells, ^ we can accel- 

 erate the rhythm of the life of our constitutive elements. In 

 other words, we have the faculty of influencing the fourth 

 dimension. 



Different workers, and especially Harrison, had tried before 

 Carrel to maintain pieces of tissue alive outside the organism. 

 But no one succeeded in prolonging the life of these ex- 

 planted^ fragments beyond a few days for lack of proper 

 nourishment. It was therefore a momentary extension of life 

 which they obtained, and not an independent and unlimited 

 existence. Dr. Carrel was the first to prevent death setting in. 

 The explanted tissues which are kept in special containers 

 with tremendous aseptic precautions, for one single microbe 

 suffices to infect the culture and to kill it, can be assimilated 

 to immortal experimental animals. We have already men- 

 tioned in the first part of this book the fact that a strain of 

 cells derived from a small fraction of embryonic heart in 191 2 



^ H. G. Wells, 'The New Accelerator', Twelve Stories and a Dream. 

 ^ See footnote, page 20. 



