Conjugated Proteins 75 



a new dimension; but each partner is, in itself, fully competent to 

 maintain a specific pattern and to convey intricate information. 



Of the lipoproteins, on the other hand, it could be said that it is only 

 through the attachment of the monomeric lipides to a protein that a 

 specific pattern of lipide arrangement becomes possible. It is not 

 improbable that the future will show that certain lipides can exist in 

 the cell in a polymerized form capable of exhibiting sequential speci- 

 ficity. But up to the present the lipides seem to be the only bulk 

 components of tissues that must be assumed to exist principally in a 

 monomeric form. If the establishment of specific arrangements is 

 considered as an attribute of cellular organization, the formation of 

 specific lipoproteins is one of the ways in which the lipides can take 

 part in such specific patterns. Certain lipides probably are attached 

 to the proteins by a combination of electrostatic and hydrogen bonds; 

 others may occur as solutions in the lipide moieties of lipoproteins. 

 There is little evidence of the existence of covalent links between lipide 

 and protein. 



The two types of conjugated protein considered here very briefly are, 

 to a certain extent, representative of conjugated proteins in general. 

 The prosthetic group may be soluble or insoluble in water; it may be 

 a monomer of comparatively simple structure, a mixture of monomers, 

 or a macromolecule having itself a complicated structure and being- 

 capable of an intricate sequential specificity. As may have been 

 gathered from what I said before, I consider the principle of conjuga- 

 tion as the main process through which nature makes big things bigger 

 and small things big. Size, in compounds participating in the life of 

 the cell, is probably not an accident. Moreover, such processes of 

 predetermined aggregation may be one of the ways in which what 

 sometimes is stupidly referred to as the "assembly line" is realized in 

 the living cell. The models of which we can conceive are probably 

 no more than an absurd caricature of the synthetic mechanisms, a 

 multiplicity of templates in space and templates in time, through which 

 the organism maintains patterns of this high degree of complexity, 

 unless we assume (and there is no reason for that) that what is dupli- 

 cated is not really a duplicate. 



Romantic deduction has done much harm in the sciences. But the 

 use, the almost unpredictable use, of imagination is an essential element 

 in the operations of the human mind. The injunction not to be aston- 

 ished — nil admirari — is one of the most stupid legacies of antiquity. 

 When we consider this ever-repeated giant throw of dice, this internally 



