Hand-Made Life?

Some busybody at Dr. George Washington Crile's Cleveland laboratory last week revealed the fact that "something amazing and revolutionary had taken place there," that Dr. Crile had synthesized inert chemicals into "something approximating life." Dr. Crile had wanted to save the announcement for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which meets in Cleveland the end of this month. Said he: "I have been frightfully embarrassed by premature publication of this work. We have not reached a point where we can tell whether our experiment will be successful or a failure. I cannot tell how long it will take us to reach a definite answer in our experiment."

Dr. Crile's experiment toward creating living material out of dead is highly exciting. Basic material of all beings is protoplasm. Every body cell contains protoplasm, a gooey material like white of egg, one-fourth heavier than water. Protoplasm always contains at least twelve elements: calcium, carbon, chlorine, hydrogen, iron, magnesium, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, potassium, sodium, sulphur. The living combination of these is exceedingly complex. Best of chemists have been unable to decipher the protoplasmic interrelations. Could they do "so, they could make protoplasm in their laboratories.

Probably some wave force, akin to light, electric or heat waves, is the ultimate essential. Probably that unknown force cooks or orients the primordial elements into the mutual relations they must have to be "alive." Such is the path of theory on which Dr. Crile, who believes that Life is an electrical phenomenon (TIME, Aug. 30, 1926), has been toiling.

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