INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS 



Albert Szent-Gyorgvi 



The Institute for Muscle Research, Marine Biological Laboratory, 

 Woods Hole, Massachusetts 



It is common knowledge that the ultimate source of all our energy 

 and negative entropy is the radiation of the sun. When a photon 

 interacts with a material particle on our globe it lifts one electron 

 from an electron pair to a higher level. This excited state, as a rule, 

 has but a very short lifetime and the electron drops back within 10-'^ ' 

 to 10-8 seconds to the ground state, giving off its excess energy in one 

 way or another. Life has learned to catch the electron in the excited 

 state, uncouple it from its partner and let it drop back to the ground 

 state through its biological machinery, utilizing its excess energy for 

 life processes. 



There is little doubt in my mind that Life was driven, at the 

 beginning, by this electronic energy and must have walked a long and 

 tortuous road perfecting its biological machinery, step by step, 

 by developing the substances fit to deal with the electron. But, how- 

 ever this machinery may have been perfected, it had to retain two 

 major shortcomings: (1) the electron and its energy were linked 

 to the energy-producing machinery and could not be taken out of 

 it; (2) while Life is continuous, radiation is intermittent and the 

 possibilities of storing high-energy electrons are very limited. 



The story of the storage and transportation of electronic energy ' 

 consists of a series of discoveries made by Nature. One of the most 

 important of these was the discovery that it is possible to preserve the 

 electronic free energy by linking two orthophosphate molecules to- 

 gether by an anhydride link, producing pyrophosphate, P-O-P. We 

 meet the POP today in a rather sophisticated form, as part of the 

 ATP molecule. This discovery solved the problem of energy trans- 

 port and alleviated the problem of energy storage. Energy stored 

 in the form of P-O-P could be transported to different loci, allowing | 

 for the development of new organs or processes, and relegating the 

 process of photosynthesis proper to special little factories, chromato- 



