AMPHISBAENA 179 



under normal circumstances; they may be a memory that the cell 

 has retained of past events. But surely even you cannot deny that, 

 for instance, the energy relationships of the cell and their en- 

 zymic basis are well understood and are the best example of the 

 concept of the unity of biochemistry? 



o: 



This I will not deny, though I cannot say that I am particularly 

 fond of this concept of unity. It has done a lot of mischief. Life, 

 as we know it, seems to be characterized by two antithetical 

 principles: unity and diversity. And it is very difficult to decide, 

 in a concrete case, with which of these principles we are dealing. 

 The unity of nature is usually laboriously pieced together by 

 combining, in a spuriously serial or cyclic fashion, snips and bits 

 taken from the most widely distant organisms. It is a sort of 

 biomontage. The fact that we all live and die in one and the same 

 world should not conceal another fact: that we are all different. 

 Even life is only one, and a minor, form of nature: a tiny foam 

 on the crystals of the earth. For an old man who is in love with 

 what goes on around him and with the multiformity of its ap- 

 pearances there can be only one battle cry: Vive la difference! 

 Is it really so important that both torturer and victim enjoyed the 

 same hearty meal and digested it in the same manner? Besides, 

 similar mechanisms do not always foreshadow similar functions. 

 The combustion oven designed by Liebig and the combustion 

 ovens constructed in Auschwitz, though based on the same scien- 

 tific principles, can hardly be taken as a proof of the unity of 

 nature. But your little speech about the processes of parturition 

 that resulted in the forceps delivery of molecular biology stopped 

 at the enzymes. Perhaps you go on. 



y: 



What you like to call my little speech did not stop, it was stopped. 

 In any event, the recognition that polypeptides of high 

 molecular weight could show great specificity as enzymes in 

 metabolic reactions and as antigens or antibodies in immunology 



