The Organism as a Whole, from a Physicochemical Viewpoint

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THE ORGANISM AS A WHOLE

From a Physicochemical Viewpoint

by

JACQUES LOEB, M.D., Ph.D., Sc.D.

Member of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research

With 51 Illustrations







G. P. Putnam's Sons
New York and London
The Knickerbocker Press

Copyright, 1916
by
Jacques Loeb

The Knickerbocker Press, New York




                                   To

                             THE MEMORY OF

                             DENIS DIDEROT

          Of the _Encyclopédie_ and the _Système de la nature_


    “He was one of those simple, disinterested, and intellectually
    sterling workers to whom their own personality is as nothing in the
    presence of the vast subjects that engage the thoughts of their
    lives.”

                                                     JOHN MORLEY.

    (Article Diderot, _Encyclopædia Britannica_.)




PREFACE


It is generally admitted that the individual physiological processes,
such as digestion, metabolism, the production of heat or of
electricity, are of a purely physicochemical character; and it is also
conceded that the functions of individual organs, such as the eye
or the ear, are to be analysed from the viewpoint of the physicist.
When, however, the biologist is confronted with the fact that in the
organism the parts are so adapted to each other as to give rise to a
harmonious whole; and that the organisms are endowed with structures
and instincts calculated to prolong their life and perpetuate their
race, doubts as to the adequacy of a purely physicochemical viewpoint
in biology may arise. The difficulties besetting the biologist in this
problem have been rather increased than diminished by the discovery of
Mendelian heredity, according to which each character is transmitted
independently of any other character. Since the number of Mendelian
characters in each organism is large, the possibility must be faced
that the organism is merely a mosaic of independent hereditary
characters. If this be the case the question arises: What moulds these
independent characters into a harmonious whole?

The vitalist settles this question by assuming the existence of a
pre-established design for each organism and of a guiding “force”
or “principle” which directs the working out of this design. Such
assumptions remove the problem of accounting for the harmonious
character of the organism from the field of physics or chemistry. The
theory of natural selection invokes neither design nor purpose, but it
is incomplete since it disregards the physicochemical constitution of
living matter about which little was known until recently.

In this book an attempt is made to show that the unity of the organism
is due to the fact that the egg (or rather its cytoplasm) is the future
embryo upon which the Mendelian factors in the chromosomes can impress
only individual characteristics, probably by giving rise to special
hormones and enzymes. We can cause an egg to develop into an organism
without a spermatozoön, but apparently we cannot make a spermatozoön
develop into an organism without the cytoplasm of an egg, although
sperm and egg nucleus transmit equally the Mendelian characters. The
conception that the cytoplasm of the egg is already the embryo in the
rough may be of importance also for the problem of evolution since
it suggests the possibility that the genus- and species-heredity are
determined by the cytoplasm of the egg, while the Mendelian hereditary
characters cannot contribute at all or only to a limited extent to
the formation of new species. Such an idea is supported by the work
on immunity, which shows that genus- and probably species-specificity
are due to specific proteins, while the Mendelian characters may be
determined by hormones which need neither be proteins nor specific or
by enzymes which also need not be specific for the species or genus.
Such a conception would remove the difficulties which the work on
Mend