78 life's beginning on the earth 



the point of making a real enzyme artificially, to say nothing 

 of making a self-reproducing enzyme like a virus. But we 

 may reasonably hope that chemical science will reach that 

 goal in a remote future. In putting together carbon struc- 

 tures, organic chemistry has succeeded in joining, in a few 

 instances, several hundred carbon atoms. The virus mate- 

 rial, however, consists of indivisible molecules, having several 

 hundred thousand carbon atoms tied together. Moreover, 

 the problem is not merely to put together in some way or 

 other as many carbon atoms as possible. A definite set-up 

 must be made. It is impossible yet to say just how this 

 should be done in order to produce a substance which has 

 the desired property of self-regeneration. 



The belief that this goal will be reached sometime in the 

 remote future is founded upon the steady development of 

 our knowledge of organic chemistry, upon the continuous 

 increase of the number of known carbon compounds, and 

 particularly upon the development of new methods for mak- 

 ing still more of them. But no scientific genius can sud- 

 denly produce by magic this final result. It can be done 

 only by painstaking work, continued through centuries. 

 Nor should we forget that the real driving force behind the 

 great development of organic chemistry is primarily the 

 expectation of rinding more useful materials: substances 

 which are better dyes, flavors, fabrics, moulding and build- 

 ing material, and above all better drugs. Indeed they are 

 needed. 



If the synthesis of life should finally be accomplished, it 

 will probably be discovered that life, which seems so im- 

 mensely involved and incomprehensible in all its com- 

 plexity, is nothing more than one of the innumerable prop- 

 erties of the compounds of carbon. Actions and forces 

 of an entirely unknown nature must be discovered before 

 this great truth becomes an acknowledged fact. At present 

 it appears as an assumption but is corroborated by a great 



