VERGE OF DISCOVERY.

Waikato Times, Volume 112, Issue 18796, 18 November 1932, Page 6

VERGE OF DISCOVERY.

Scores of diseases are transmitted by microbes visible under a mlerosoope. Inoculate any normal man with the proper microbe and he contracls the corresponding disease. Yet there arc diseases, such as measles, smallpox, yellow fever, colds, and the foot-and-mouth disease, which can also be inoculated but are not apparently caused by a microbe. The blood of man suffering from yellow fever differs in no perceptible quality from normal blood. Yet it contains something deadly. Even after it has been filtered through porcelain with pores so fine than the smallest microscopically visible particle has been excluded it retains its deadlines. For want of a better name biologists speak of these invisible agents as “flltrable viruses.” In them biology faces an enigma.

Are they alive? Heat and poisons destroy them. But analogy is no safe guide. Ferments, whioh are “dead" in the ordinary sense of the word, are “killed" in much the same way. On the other hand, the flltrable viruses mutate or produce new varieties; they adapt themselves to new conditions; they multiply. These are fundamental characteristics of life. All this is especially important because of the menace of canoer. Dr. Rous, of the Rockefeller Institute, has mashed fowl tumours and passed them through the finest filters, only to find that a minute amount of the filtrate induced a tumour in a healthy fowl. What is Hie fatal agent? Whence does it come ?

It ts evident that biology stands upon the threshold of a discovery as great as any made by Pasteur or Kooh. The flltrable viruses may prove to have an importance greater than we suppose. The work of Rous suggests that we are in the presence of phenomena that He at the root of life. Death and life—we distinguish between the two in the higher forms as If there were two categories. Yet In the last analysis all matter Is composed of atoms. Somewhere between the simple “dead” atom of hydrogen and the most primitive living cell activity appears that we call life. Between the two there must be something that is neither dead nor alive. Have we perhaps caught a glimpse of It In these flltrable viruses?