8. APPLICATIONS AND PREDICTIONS 153 



to underlie cell organization has been obtained to suggest definite experi- 

 mental procedures for testing the validity of our basic postulates. This 

 should provide an adequate observational procedure for deciding whether 

 the "thermodynamic" analysis of cell behaviour proposed in this study 

 can be pursued further and the theory improved, or whether the theory 

 is fundamentally in error and must be abandoned. The search for an 

 alternative microscopic or molecular basis for a thermodynamic-like descrip- 

 tion of cell and organismic behaviour will then certainly continue, for it is the 

 biologist's goal to understand the organizational principles underlying the 

 phenomena of adaptation, competence, regulation, rhythmic activities and 

 other properties of cells. However, if some experimental support is obtained 

 for the theory which has been advanced in these pages, then we have a founda- 

 tion from which to extend and improve our analysis. 



It seems likely that the two most essential improvements which will be 

 required are a quantization of the theory and an attempt to extend it to cover 

 growing, not just resting, cells. By quantized oscillators we mean ones with 

 limit-cycle characteristics whose stable trajectories are separated by regions 

 of instability in phase space, as discussed at the beginning of the chapter. Such 

 an extension would involve some difficulties, but it is by no means out of the 

 question. There is already a basis for such a theory in the work of Krylov and 

 Bogoliubov, especially in their paper of 1937 where they demonstrate the 

 existence of measures for a certain class of non-linear oscillators, to which 

 oscillating biochemical control systems can be shown to belong. The other 

 necessary extension, to use an invariant which applies to cells in a steady 

 state of growth, seems also to be a distinct possibility. Such an invariant 

 would then apply to the steady resting state as a special limiting case, so that 

 the present theory would be obtained as a particular limit. However, these 

 developments must await some experimental confirmation of the basic macro- 

 scopic phenomena predicted by the classical theory. 



