Life and death

by A. Dastre

2nd. The phenomena which accompany functional repose correspond to the building up of the reserve-stuff destroyed in the preceding period, to the organizing synthesis. The latter remains “internal, silent, concealed in its phenomenal expression, noiselessly gathering together the materials which will be expended. We do not see these phenomena of organization directly. The histologist and the embryogenist alone, following the development of the element or of the living being, sees the changes and the phases which reveal this silent effort. Here is a store of substance; there, the formation of an envelope or a nucleus; there, a division or multiplication, a renewal.” This type of phenomena is the only type which has no direct analogues: it is peculiar, special to the living being: what is really vital is this evolutive synthesis. Life is creation.

Criticism of Claude Bernard.—All this is perfectly true. Thirty years of the most intensive scientific development have run by since these lines were written, and have not essentially changed the ideas therein expressed. His work in its broad lines remains intact. Does that imply, however, that everything is perfect in detail and expression, and that there is no reason for making it more precise or for giving it fresh form? No doubt this is not so. Although Claude Bernard contributed to establish the essential distinction between the real living protoplasm and the materials of reserve-stuff which it contains, he has not drawn a sufficiently clear distinction between what belongs to each of the categories. He has not specified, in relation to organic destruction, what bearing it has on the organic materials of reserve-stuff. Sometimes he uses the term “organic destruction,” which is correct, and sometimes “vital destruction,” which is of doubtful import. Further, he employs an obscure and paradoxical formula to characterize the obvious but nevertheless not specific phenomena of organic destruction, and he says: “life is death.”

Current Views.—Nowadays, if I may express a personal opinion on this important distinction between functional activity and functional repose, I should say that after having distinguished between the two categories of phenomena we must try to correlate them. We must try to discover, for instance, what there is in common between the muscle in repose and the muscle in contraction, and to perceive in the muscular tonus a kind of bridge thrown between these two conditions. The functional activity would be uninterrupted, but it would have its degrees of activity. The muscular tonus would be the permanent condition of an activity which is capable only of being considerably raised or lowered. Similarly for the glandular functional activity; the periods of charge must be connected with the periods of discharge. In a word, following the constant path of the human mind in scientific knowledge, after having drawn the distinctions that are necessary to our understanding of things, we must obliterate them. After having dug our ditches we must fill them up again. After having analyzed we must synthesize. The distinction between the phenomena of functional activity and the phenomena of functional repose or purely vegetative and nutritive activity, though only valid in the case of a provisional and approximate truth, none the less throws light on the obscure regions of biology.

The succession of energy and repose, of sleep and awakening, is a universal law, or at least a very general law, connected with the laws of energetics. The heart, the lungs, the muscles, the glands, the brain obey in the most obvious manner this obligation of rhythmical activity. The reason is clear. It is because the functional activity involves what is generally a sudden expenditure of energy, and this has to be replaced by what is generally a slow process of reparation. Functional activity is an explosive destruction of a chemical reserve which is built up again more or less slowly.

Criticism of Le Dantec’s “New Theory of Life.”—Let us now examine the antithesis of Claude Bernard’s views. There are evidently rudimentary organisms in which the differentiation of the two categories of phenomena is but little marked; in which, apart from the movement, it is impossible to recognize intermittent, functional activities clearly distinct from morphogenic activity. It is not in this domain of the indistinct that we must seek the touchstone of physiological distinctions. Clearly, we must not choose these elementary plastids to test the doctrine of functional assimilation and functional destruction. But is not this exactly what Le Dantec did when he began his researches on brewers’ yeast? When we try to examine things, we must choose the conditions under which they are differentiated, and not those in which they are confused. And this is why, in the significant words of Auguste Comte, “the more complex living beings are, the better known they are to us.” The philosopher goes still farther in this direction, and adds “directly it is a question of the characteristics of animality we must start from the man, and see how those characteristics are little by little degraded, rather than start from the sponge and endeavour to discover how these characteristics are developed. The animal life of the man assists us to understand the life of the sponge, but the converse is not true.”

When, moreover, we consider a vegetable organism such as yeast, which derives its energy, not from itself, not from the potential chemical energy of its reserve-stuff, but directly from the medium—that is to say, from the potential chemical energy of the compounds which form its medium of culture,—we then find ourselves in the worst possible situation for the recognition of organic destruction. Further, it is doubly wrong to assert that in so ill-chosen a type the functional phenomena do not result from an organic destruction—for at first there are no very distinct functional phenomena here—and, in the second place, there certainly is organic destruction. The phenomena of the morphogenic vitality detected in the yeast are the exact concomitants, or the results, of the destruction of an organic compound, which in this case is sugar. The yeast destroys an immediate principle, and this is the point of departure of its vital manifestations; only, it has not, as a preliminary, clearly incorporated and assimilated this principle. When, therefore, the functional phenomena are effaced and disappear, we none the less find phenomena of destruction of organic compounds which are in a measure, a preface to the phenomena of growth. This is what happens in the case of brewers’ yeast: and here, again, the two categories of facts exist. Once more, we find, in the first place, the phenomena of destruction (destruction of sugar, reduced by simplification to alcohol and carbonic acid)—phenomena which this time no longer respond to obvious functional manifestations; and, in the second place, the phenomena of chemical and organogenic synthesis, corresponding to the growth of the yeast and the multiplication of its protoplasm. The former are no longer detected, as we have just said, by striking manifestations. However, it is not true that everything which is visible and which may be isolated outside the activity of the yeast is part of those phenomena. The boiling of the juice or the mash, the heat given off by the copper, all this phenomenal apparatus is but the consequence of the production of the carbonic acid and of its liberations—i.e., the consequence of the act of destruction of the sugar. Here is organic destruction with its energetic manifestations!

This example of the life of brewers’ yeast, of the saccharomyces, specially chosen by Le Dantec as being absolutely clear and giving the best illustration of his argument, contradicts him at every point. The general thesis of this vigorous thinker is that we cannot distinguish between the two parts of the vital act, organic destruction, and assimilating synthesis; that these two acts are not successive; that they give rise to phenomenal manifestations equally evident, apparent, or striking. Now, in the case of yeast, the phenomenon of destruction is clearly distinct from that of the assimilating synthesis which multiplies the substance of the saccharomyces. In fact, the action is realized by means of an alcoholic diastase manufactured by the cell; and Büchner succeeded in isolating this alcoholic ferment which splits up the sugar into alcohol and carbonic acid, and also in vitro and in vivo, makes the vat boil and heats the liquid. All the yeast is at work at once, says M. Dantec. No, and this is the proof.

And, further, Pasteur himself, who had shown the relation of the decomposition of the sugar to the fact of the growth of the yeast and of the production of accessory substances such as succinic acid and glycerine, always referred to correlation between these phenomena. The destruction of the sugar is the correlative of the life of the yeast. This was his favourite formula. It never entered his head that there could be a confusion instead of a correlation, and that there might be only one and the same act, the phases of which would be indistinguishable. This unfortunate idea, which was fated to be so rapidly contradicted, is due to Le Dantec. Far from it being the case, Pasteur had distinguished the ferment function from the life of the yeast. According to him, the yeast may exist sometimes as a ferment and sometimes otherwise.

§ 3. Correlation of Two Orders of Vital Facts.

It is this correlation between acts distinct in themselves but usually connected that was announced by Claude Bernard. And, mirabile dictu—and this is the natural outcome of the perfect sanity of mind of this great physiologist—it happens that not only Pasteur’s researches, but the development of a new science, Energetics, and Büchner’s discovery lend support to his views, and that, too, in a field where one would have thought they had no application. Le Dantec is wrong when he declares that these ideas only apply to vertebrates. “It is clear,” he says on several occasions, “that the author has in view the metazoa and even the vertebrates.” Well! no. All that is general, universally applicable, and universally true. So that there are two orders of distinct phenomena energetically opposed and certainly connected. We need only repeat Claude Bernard’s own words quoted by Le Dantec in order to confute them.