SCIENCE SIFTINGS

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXI, Issue 19128, 2 October 1924, Page 10

SCIENCE SIFTINGS

ALIVE WITHOUT A BODY. Dr. Alexis Carrel, of the Rockefeller Institute, New York, who has kept alive for twelve years a chicken’s heart divorced from the body, is attending the annual meeting of the Bri t'.sh Medical Association in Bradford. Dr. Carrel, who is regarded as the wizard of experimental surgery, removed the heart from the bird and placed it in a special 4 ‘culture.’’ The organ has increased since then by onefifth its original size, and is still growing.

Every two or three years it is transplanted into a fresh 44 culture,” to which is added, from time to time, the blood of old and young hens. It has been shown that the blood of the old hens retards the growth of the organism, while that of the young accelerates it. From this scientists deduce the fact that there exists a certain chemical substance, peculiar to youth, which is not present in the organism of full maturity. This gives rise to the startling suggestion that there may exist an actual elixir of life which science may eventually segregate from the organism xnd transplant. The more daring followers of Dr. Carrel’s work in the United States have proposed that the next few generations may witness the actual manufacture of this elixir.

Twelve years ago Dr. Carrel startled hiS profession by a series of experiments which included the introduction of organs taken from dead : nimals into live animals which had more need of them.

Dr. Carrel’s experiments so far havo been made on domestic animals, although in one case he attempted to graft a sheep’s kidney on the organs of a woman. The patient subsequently died, but it was shown that her death was only indirectly due to the operation.

The scientist’s experimental “ trophies’ ’ include a black dog on whom was grafted the leg of a white dog in such a manner that the animal used it quite naturally. He has accomplished the growth of cancer tissue in solution quite apart from the body it was cut from.—Evening Dispatch. BRAIN-POISONING. The real mystery of sleep-walking is the mystery of a partially awakened brain. How comes it that our eyes and ears can slumber while our feet are quickened? Some light on this dark problem has recently been obtained by the researches of a group of Russian men of science. They have found that sleep is more or less wilful turning away of the senses from the demands of life —because at the moment these demands cannot be satisfied. When we are weary all our senses — all our nerves —are so played out that they “turn away from life” at the same moment. The brain, so to speak, goes to sleep in a lump. When we arc sleepless, on the other hand, this is because our brains are excited either by sane emotion or by the poison of a disease. In this overeager state they are able, for the time, to satisfy every demand of life, and so do not, will not, turn away from it. It happens occasionally that a part of the brain is poisoned whereas the rest of the organ remains healthy. When the healthy parts fall asleep the excited or poisoned parts remain wakeful. One sees examples of this often enough in the course of fevers. The patient sees but cannot or does nut hear, or hears but seems unable to'see. He is not blind; he is not deaf. All that is happening is that one or other sense has refused to fall asleep. In the case of the slcep-w’alker, that part of the brain which controls the movements of the legs is awake, while the eyes and ears are sound asleep. In other words, the sleep-walker is suffering from partial brain-poisoning. —Sunday Chronicle. STEAM FROM MID-EARTH. What will happen when the earth runs short of coal and oil supplies? This problem was discussed by Professor W. W. Watts, in a paper on “Geology in the Service of Man,” at the British Association at Toronto. He instanced the possibility of a great new power which humanity may harness to its service nothing less than the heat of the earth’s nether regions. A beginning has been made at Volterra, in Italy, where has been found a new source of power in’the high temperature steam from Fumaroles, which has previously been used only as a source of borax. Now the steam is being tapped by boring adventurously carried out, and its chief heat is employed in running great power stations. This may be but the beginning of the application of a new and valuable source of power in which the services of geology will be required and from which that science stands to learn much. We are haunted by the fear that a limit will be imposed by high temperature to deep mining while, that very heat may provide energy as valuable as the material which would otherwise be mined—just as we dread the gas from certain coal seams, when the gas might, if it could be exploited, give a return equivalent to that of the coal itself. ’ ’—Scotsman.