116 SESSION I. DISCUSSION 



resemble spiral nebulae, there are some which are right-handed and other which are 

 left-handed. My colleague O. K. Rossolimo (1948) has shown that the whole territory of 

 the Soviet Union is inhabited by colonies of one type, and only in the Caucasus, in the 

 Ussurii region and in Tyan-Shan, where there are relicts of ancient floras and faunas of 

 the Tertiary period, estimated as being more than a million years old, and also in the 

 tropics, do mixed populations, forming left-handed and right-handed colonies, predo- 

 minate. In many hundreds of species of higher plants I have investigated the direction of 

 the spiral vascular bundles. It was found that the great majority of species of the flora 

 of the Soviet Union (about 93°,,) have only left-handed vascular bundles. In about 2% 

 of species they were right-handed and in about 4"o of species they were of both sorts, 

 i.e. they were racemic. Tropical families of plants — Begoniaccae, Balsaminaceae and 

 Orchidaceae — are either right-handed or racemic. From these two examples it follows 

 that the nearer we get to the equator the greater is the prevalence of racemic populations. 

 This distribution suggests that either the racemic form is characteristic of more ancient 

 types, the tropical flora and fauna being more ancient than those of higher latitudes, or 

 else that at the equator some other factors are constantly at work, for example, the passage 

 of the Sun through the zenith, which maintains the incidence of left and right forms 

 better than at higher latitudes. It would be desirable to collect more material on this 

 subject in both the northern and southern hemispheres. This would require the co- 

 ordinated participation, in the work, of biologists of all countries of the world. 



A. S. KONIKOVA (U.S.S.R.): 



Prof. Bernal's address is of great interest to this conference. 



He put forward hypotheses which are extremely important for working out the problem 

 of life but they are not all incontrovertible. I shall permit myself to dwell on some which 

 seem to me to require further clarification. 



With regard to the scheme of biopoesis presented for our attention, I should hke to 

 say the following: this is rather a scheme of the development of Nature in general than a 

 scheme of the origin of life. It shows the progressive motion of nature but the specific 

 transition from non-living to living nature is not shown in it. 



The whole scheme contains no reference to the appearance of the phenomenon of 

 self-development in some compounds and, therefore, nowhere in it is a boundary drawn 

 between that which is still not hving and that which is already living. Even when there 

 developed an eobiont-nucleoproteid, which is capable of self-reproduction, according 

 to the scheme it could only reproduce exactly the same nucleoproteid : the eobiont is not 

 capable of self-development as well as the other complicated forms of matter set forth in 

 the scheme up to the point of the appearance of the organism. 



I suggest that the absence of the specific elements of life from Prof. Bernal's scheme of 

 biopoiesis is due to an inaccurate definition of the concept of life by this speaker. 



According to this definition, the concept of life is 'the embodiment within a certain 

 volume of self-maintaining chemical processes'. But any reversible chemical reaction in 

 non-living nature would come within that definition. 



I suggest that this is not the most adequate and authentic definition of life which we 

 can give on the basis of the contemporary level of studies of the subject. A more correct 

 definition would seem to be one which does not reflect the factor of the self-maintaining 

 properties of particular substances but, rather, the factor of their self-development, 

 which does not appear outside living nature. Of course, with the emergence of life, the 

 factor of self-development of matter does not manifest itself in the material world in 

 general in the form of a process of creation of more and more new substances, but within 

 the confines of particular chemical substances. 



A living thing is a chemical substance or complex which, by a process of chemical 

 reactions with the substances of its surroundings, accomplishes its reproduction and 

 development, i.e. it remains itself while yet changing (not only in the direction of decay). 



Life is the attainment, by a chemical substance, of the ability to rebuild itself by inter- 



