Connecticut western news., 1902-01-02
L0EB'S DISCOVERIES.
Secret of Life His as Well as
 Mystery of Death.
ELECTRICITY IS THE VITAL FORGE

Causing Chemical Phsno~sen., Sets
 Up Electrical Action Which Makes
 Us Live.
 Chicago, Jan. 1.-Electricnl charges responsible for all the active phsnoms- na of life. In other words, electricity Is the basis of life.
 This is the sweeping conclusion with which Dr. Jacques Loeb amazed the physiologists gathered in their annual meeting at the University of Chicago.
 On Monday Professor Loeb had as- founded the learned men of science by the announcement of his discovery of the real nature of death. Yesterday he revolutionized their ideas of life and its causes by telling them the re- suits of his experiments at Woods Ho1 last summer.
 Hitherto it has been taken for grant ed by msn of science that the food we eat nourishes us by furnishing the tissues and the muscles of the body with thermo, or heat energy. This hypothesis, according to Professor Loeb, is totally wrong.
 Instead of the food furnishing the muscles with heat energy it supplies electrical energy, which, after being converted into mechanical energy, is responsible for all the muscular con- traction and organic processes of liv- Ing organisms.
 Professor Loeb has arrived at this revolutionary conclusion only after a series of difficult and intricate expert ments extending over years. All his work along the line of artificial repro duction of animals. of determining the effect of salt on the heart beat and the rythmic motions and other mus cles and of the ascsrtainment of ths character of the destructive processes at work in the eggs of simple unicel- lular animals has been only means to the end of making the determining answer to the one great question of what is the cause of life,
 His Greatest Discovery.
 pr. Loeb told the members of the American Physiological society, be- fore whom he spoke yesterday, that ha regarded all his previous discoveries as subsidiary to this one.
 Dr. Loeb received the first hint which led him to his new theory of life through an observation of the long recognized fact that electricity is able to affect protoplasm in a more uni versal and effective way than any oth- CT form of stimulus.
 From this he drew the inference that If electricity is able to affect the protoplasm in the form of currents it ought to do go in the form of what is known to the scientist as ions. An lon is, simply stated, an electrically charged atom or group of atoms. All last summer Dr. Loeb was en- gagged in experiments to determine the toxic and antitoxic effects of ions on protoplnsm, which Is the basic sub stance of all life. He discovered that any one salt will act as q poison on the eggs of the sea urchin, but by add ing one or more of certain other salts he found that he was able to counter act the effects of this toxic effect. From such experiments as these he arrived at the conclusion that the toxic and antitoxic effects of the salts were due to the manner in which It's atoms are electrically charged. He found that when a salt whose atoms are positively charged come in contact with the eggs of the sea urchin they interfered with the life processes, while salts whose atoms were negatively charged stimulate contraction. Professor Loeb discover ed that the presence of both positively and negatively charged atoms were necessary. The phenomenon of life. he declares, is due to the play between the different charges of electricity in the molecules.