Atlanta tri-weekly journal. [volume] (Atlanta, Ga.) 1920-19??, 1922-09-26
NEW LIGHT on LIFE
By DR.. Edwin E. Slosson

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Was the first living being plant or ami
NAL? How could either originate out Of nom
existing matter?
These are questions that have hitherto baf-
fled scientists. They could trace back, more
or less satisfactorily, the lines Of develop
ment of plants and animals to the simplest
and most primitive forms of life but there
they ran up against an insurmountable wall,
on the near side of which was the world Of
living organisms and on the far side the
world of inert mineral and inorganic matter.
We all know that non-living matter can
be converted over into living matter for we
do that ourselves whenever we eat or breathe.
We all know that green plants have the
power of building up sugar and starch and
wood (the so-called carbohydrates out of
the water of the soil and carbon dioxide of
the air. for we can see them do 1t any sunny
day. But it is life only that can bring into
the living organism this inorganic material
Water and carbon dioXide, which is plain
"soda water" does lot spontaneously change
over into sugar or start to grow into plant.
1t requires green colored granules of the
leaves, called cblorophyll, to effect this trans
formation.
But chlorophyll Is very complicated
chemical compound. 1t is formed only by
y
rays from white sprouts. So the plant must
exist before ch1orophyll is formed. But on
the other hand plant could not exist unless
| it got it's energy from the sugar and other
| stuff stored up previously by some chloro-
| phyll-bearing plant Even the simplest green
plant cannot live and grow on it's nutritive
salts in the sunshine unless it has bit Of
| plant-stuff to feed on as starter
| We might surmise as way out of the
dilemma that animal life came first on the
earth and in decaying supplied the primitive
plants with the necessary organic food stuff,
But here we are blocked because animals are
parasites Of plants. They live on the sugars
and so forth that the green leaves have stored
up by means Of sunshine.
| So this was the perplexing situation.
Plants can feed on animals or other plants.
Animals can feed on plants or other animals.
But where could the first animals or plants
get their food when there was nothing but
mineral matter in the world? 1t was worse
than the old question, which came first, the
| hen or the egg?
But Of late we are beginning to get light
on the problem. The wall between the liv-
ing and non-living is crumbling down. Certain
sugars and proteins, such as the p1 mt forms
that we eat, can now be made in the labora-
tory out of inorganic material. Artificial
cells have been constructed that grow and
crawl and feed themselves and stick out
| feelers and sub-divide very much like living
cells. 1t has been found that ultraviolet
! rays, that is, light of such short waves that
I 1t cannot be seen, can convert water and car
bon dioxide into sugar as chlorophyll does.
These short waves are not contained in
the sunshine that reaches the earth today
| but 1t is found that ordinary rays may act
the same way in the presence of certain sub
stances such as iron rust in water These
| same energetic rays are able to incorporate
| the nitrogen of mineral salts into compounds
| like the protein Of the living cell. So here we
see the possibility that the action of the sun
light on the sea in primordial periods-or
even in the present-might produce suffi-
cient food to give single cell start in life
and enable it to grow and multiply and de-
velop into other and higher forms.
But how this primal cell got to going in
this way the biologists are only beginning
to surmise.. DR.. e. J. Allen at the recent Hull
meeting of the British Association for the
Advancement of Science ventures the theory
that the first organism was of the animal
| sort and spherical shape, but that it gradu-
| ally grew a tail or whip that enabled 1t to
rise to the sunny surface Of the sea whenever
| 1t sank below and that it there acquired the
| chlorophyll by which it could make its own
| food out Of the air and water. This is far
from knowing what did happen in those early
! days, but it is a great advance to be able
even to speculate as to how it might have
happened since not many years ago it seemed
that it could not happen at all.-Science
| Service.