ISOLATED CELL CONSTITUENTS 83 



Plato, would Socrates? What Heraclitus would have said, I know. 

 He would have said: "You do not make the same mess twice". 

 For, really, our entire conception of the meaning of isolated cell 

 constituents and of their action under the artificial conditions of 

 customary experimentation is due for a revision. I, for one, 

 would not be astonished if thirty or fifty years hence most of the 

 terms and conceptions with which our science — perhaps then 

 known as baroque biochemistry — has made us familiar would be 

 deader than phlogiston is today. 



2. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF ISOLATED CELL CONSTITUENTS 



Now, let us ask a very silly question*. Can we be sure that the 

 substances that we isolate from the cell exist in the living cell? 

 I should say, the answer will have to be: They do and they do 

 not. A simple monomer — a fatty acid, a sugar, etc. — which we 

 find in a cell probably has not been produced de novo in the 

 course of the devastating processes known as careful isolation. 

 Even in such cases, to decide whether these substances occurred 

 in the free state is a difficult matter. It becomes immensely more 

 so when we come to high polymers often endowed, as in the case 

 of proteins or nucleic acids, with a multiplicity of charges. I have 

 little doubt that the physical description of the molecular ar- 

 rangement of such complicated compounds, which must be 

 drawn, quartered, pickled, or embalmed in order to be studied, 

 defines the pleasing shape into which they can be put rather than 

 the form in which they exist in life. For this reason, I look with 

 esthetic pleasure but with the utmost diffidence and mental reserve 

 on the various structural models and spiral contortions — beautiful 

 examples of non-representational sculpture — that have been 

 proposed for the nucleic acids. I should advise to wait and see. 

 Models — in contrast to those who sat for Renoir — improve with 

 age. 



* "The 'silly question' is the first intimation of some totally novel 

 development." L. Price, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (Mentor 

 Book Edition, New York, 1956, p. 145). 



References p. 98 



