Evening star., 1936-05-28

Turning upside down generally ac-
cepted concepts Of the basic mechanismS
of life and denying the gene theory of
heredity, DR.. E. E. Just, professor of
zoology at Howard University, has just
announced after more than 20 years of
experimentation with the ultimate units
of living things an hypothesis which
bridges the gulf between development
and geneticS.
The paper just issued by DR.. Just, If
it finds any general acceptance among
biologists, is revolutionary in its impll-
cations to the biological science OF the
future.
1t places the origin of life and its de-
velopment through evolution in new
and simpler light
1t explains such anomalies as cancer
and promises an entirely new field OF
therapeutic attack. In fact, DR.. Just
says, he himself now is at work on
hopeful way of reversing the process
which, he has shown, results in uninhlb-
tied cell growth in some of the lower
organisms.
1t throws new light on such obscure
biological phenomena as multiple births
and regeneration of lost parts by some
animals.
The new hypothesis, which flies in the
face of the theories of the most eminent
living biologists, is based on precision
experiments of the Washington pro-
fessor in the United States, Italy and
Germany, where he served as a guest
professor. He disputes fatty conclusions
of such biologists as DR.. Frank r. Lille,
president, and DR.. T. H. Morgan, past
president of the National Academy OF
Sciences. The basic experimental work
has been the painstaking determination
of the weight of the nuclei of the eggs
of hundreds of organisms such as
spongeS, echinodernlS and worms.
DR.. Just's thesis, in brief, is that the
genes, supposed units of heredity. do
not themselves contain the potentialities
of the hereditary qualities they are sup
posed to transmit, but act by with
drawing from the cytoplasm of the cell
everything except the substance which
will develop in a specific direction. What
the genes withdraw depends in turn on
the shape assumed by surface of the cell.
The genes, under this theory, act as
inhibitors instead of activators. Certain
human embryonic material can form
only certain kinds of brain cells or GER
tain kinds of hair cells because the po-
tentiality of everything else has been
withdrawn from the cytoplasm at that
point by the genes. It has been locked
up" There is some disturbance OF the
cytoplasm which releases from the genes
some Of this bound-up material. II
enough is withdrawn the cell loses its
speciflcity altogether and the result is
uninhibited growth-the very phenome-
non found in malignant tumors. DR..
just has been able to unlock" the genes
with ultraviolet light irradiation. The
problem, he says, is to find some way OF
locking them" Much the same phe-
nomenon on a controlled scale takes
place with certain lower animals which
are able to grow new head, or new
limbs, after an injury.
Living things, plant or animal, start
as eggs. The egg is a pluri- potent single
cell, the unit of the structure OF life. 1t
is composed Of two essential parts-the
nucleus and the cytoplasm. The nucleus
consists of microscopically visible bodies,
the chromosomes which, In turn, are
made up Of ultramicroscopic particles,
the genes. This nucleus Is imbedded In