CREATION OF LIFE IN LABORATORIES IS PREDICTED.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 18178, 10 June 1927, Page 14

CREATION OF LIFE IN LABORATORIES IS PREDICTED.

SIR OLIVER LODGE PRESENTS PICTURE OF NEW WORLDS. By Telegraph.—Press Assn.—Copyright. Sydney “ Sun ” Cable. , LONDON, June S. “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,” he continued, “but it 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 some time, developed from it.. What has happened in the past may be humanly understood and humanly managed in the future. Many might fear su<?h a conclusion, believing that such self acting mechanism would remove from the universe the need for planning by a creative mind. Such fears are groundless, because a chemist making such a vitalised protoplasm is not himself a self-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 liquified and gradually cooled and solidified until the localised individual particles of matter became capable of receiving and incorporating some of the general mind of which the ether must be full. Gradually, through agelong stages, the particles developed until the reign of the individual consciousness began culminating in man. “I believe the ether is the physical concomitant of the Supreme Mind, of which we are only conscious of an infinitesimal fraction,” he concluded.