THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS SATURDAY, JUNE 11, 1927. THE ORIGIN OF LIFE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIV, Issue 19660, 11 June 1927, Page 10

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS SATURDAY, JUNE 11, 1927. THE ORIGIN OF LIFE.

With the courage for which he has so high a reputation, Sir Oliver Lodge has staked his opinion on the probability, and almost the inevitability that life will some day be created in the biologist's laboratory. Daring as the opinion must seem, it is widely shared in scientific circles, in spite of the long succession of failures to dethrone the doctrine of biogenesis—life only from pre-exist-t ing life. The quest for the bridge i between the lifeless and the living has long been an absorbing and fas- - cinating one-. In Aristotle's day, the existence of the bridge was assumed. He held that the sun's direct action ■ produced tadpoles from the mud of lakes, eels from the Nile's ooze, and parentless shellfish from the sea. As his views dominated human thought • for nearly two thbusand years, the | idea of abiogenesis, which underlies s the opinion expressed by Sir Oliver Lodge, went long unquestioned. Then, suddenly, with the challenge issued by Francesco Redi, a combat arose between the alien ideas. He ' founds that, by keeping putrefying meat secui'e from contagion by living things, no life appeared in it. Con- , sequently, he proclaimed that life could come only from pre-existing life. He was meagrely supported, and his thesis at first was scouted. But it had come to stay. Others, notably Reaumur, continued his combat with convincing zeal, and for a hundred years biogenesis held the field. The microscope's invention in the thirteenth century revealed, however, so multitudinous a prevalence of infinitesimal creatures that the pathway from atom to organism seemed not so difficult to imagine after all. Controversy broke out afresh. In the eighteenth century the opposing schools were violently active. Needham doubted the application of Redi's generalisation to the lowliest forms of life. Buffon, seeing in Needham's expeuments , proof of his own theory of life, favoured the latter's cause. Spallanzani, with more rigorous tests, disposed of Needham's theory. So the battle went agjain to biogenesis. Chemistry next lent aid to the old notion of spontaneous generation, using the discovery of oxygen as a vitalising gas to challenge Spallanzani's conclusions. Might it not work the wonder? But experiments by Schulze, Schwann, Helmholtz, Schroeder and Van Dusch proved this impossible. Next Pouchet's " Heterogenesis " raised another storm of questioning. He sarcastic- " ally ridiculed thd idea of an atmosphere full of living germs, declaring the suggestion of their agency in producing life amid putrefaction to be preposterous. It was another Frenchman who thereafter decis- • ively tipped the scale back to the view of no life except from life. This was Pasteur, educated as a B chemist and disciplined in experimental research. Cohn's studies of ■ germs in the atmosphere completed Pasteur's demonstration. The controversy shifted to England. Tyndall called public attention to Pasteur's work, only to provoke a youns? medico. Bastian, to furious opposition. The latter's claim that he had produced organisms from lifeless liquids was relentlessly examined by many, among whom Dallinger was proYninent; and soon Huxlev was able to state from the presidential chair of the British Association that " life only from life " was " victorious along the whole line." Tyndall, while frankly wishing that victory had gone the other way, was equally frank in saying that " the ' evidence in favour of spontaneous generation crumbles in the grasp of' the competent." The struggle seemed over, but Bastian, although discredited, could not be silenced: and right into our own time the quest has gone on. It has little to , show but the ruins of theories — Huxley's bathybius, Butschli's oilfoam. Loeb's and Sohaefer's chemical products, and Crile's electromechanical cell. Yet the hope of eventually discovering the bridge between the lifeless and the living has never died, and Sir Oliver Lodge has again expressed it.

It is a hope to which science is inevitably pledged by its accepted commission to seek a solution for every riddle confronting it. There is nothing impious in the hope, although there has been a tendency for protagonists of theology to wel'come as a confirmation of theism the successive triumphs of biogenesis. Their view is doubtless prompted by a desire to leave room for divine interposition in the usual running of the universe. Sir Oliver Lodge, with his markedly reverent approach to all ultimate questions, with which science as such has really nothing to do, has performed a useful service by his emphasis on the hope's innocence of any wish to " bow God out of His universe." Let it be shown that another gap in Nature is closed up, in the discovery of the bridge between the lifeless and the living: theism still remains the most cogent explanation of Nature that philosophy and religion have found. That the Jiving has been produced from the non-living is held by all devout thinkers. May they not also believe that it is still producible from the non-living even by human agency, which, as Sir Oliver Lodge suggests somewhat pertinently, is after all a living force 1 ? Whatever may be thought of this suggestion, it remains feasible that what may be devoutly believed to have happened at some time in the paste may happen often again, and is actually happening, although the process may not as yet be known. In any event, the discovery of the! process would not vitiate Martineau's dictum, which keen and thoroughgoing scientists like Ray Lankester and J. A. Thomson have accented without reserve: " Science discloses the method of the world, but not its cause."