CREATION OF LIFE

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXI, 10 June 1927, Page 5

CREATION OF LIFE

IN THE BIOLOGISTS’ LABORATORIES SIR OLIVER LODGE’S PROPHECY (By Electric Telegraph—Copyright), (“Sun” Cable) LONDON, Bth June. "I regard it as probable, almost, inevitable, that life will some day r be created in biologists’ laboratories,’ declared Sir Oliver Lodge in an address to the Oxford Psychological Society. “The idea is not repugnant to religion, but must rather be welcomed as showing the amount of thought necessary to pvoduce any imitation of what already exists. We must not be afraid of scientific progress. The earth was once a molten mass in which' life was impossible; yet life somehow and at some time developed from it. What has liappaned in tin/' past may be humanly understood and humanly managed in the future. Many might fear such a. conclusion, beli’eving that such self-acting mechanism would removo from the universe the need for planning by a creative mind. Such fears are groundless, because a-chemist making such vitalised protoplasm was not himself an acting machine and could not create life without antecedent life.”

Sir Oliver Lodge concluded by vividly picturing the creation of new worlds in which glowing gases were first liquefied .and gradually cooled and solidified until localised individual particles of matter became capable of receiving and incorporating some of fhe general mind of which the ether must be full. Gradually, through age-long stages,- particles developed until the reign of individual consciousness began, culminating _in man. “I believe ether is a physical concomitant of the supreme mind of which we are. only a conscious infinitesimal fraction.”