SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS

Southland Times, Issue 20200, 10 June 1927, Page 7

SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS

CREATION OF LIFE. MAY YET BE DONE IN BIOLOGISTS’ LABORATORIES. (Rec. 9 p.m.) London, June 8. “I regard it as probable, almost inevitable, that life will some day 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 produce 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 sometime, developed from it. What has happened in the past may be humanly understood and humanly managed in the future. Many might fear such a conclusion, believing such self-acting mechanism would remove from the universe the need for planning bv a creative mind. Such fears arc groundless because a chemist making such vitalised protoplasm was not himself a selfacting 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 liquified and gradually cooled and solidified until localised individual particles of matter became capable of receiving and incorporating some of the general mind of which either must be full. Gradual!}’ through the age, long stages of particles developed until a reign of individual consciousness began, culminating in man. “I believe ether is a physical concomitant of the supreme mind of which we are only conscious of an infinitesimal fraction.”—Sun Cable.