Life

The more alert of the Cleveland citizenry know that Dr. George Washington Crile is one of the great men of surgery. They know that his method of blocking nerves to prevent the shock of operations (anoci-association) is as great a landmark in medicine as the first application of anesthetics, that he has improved the method of transfusing blood; that he is a world authority on goiter, that at his Cleveland Clinic they may get a physical examination of scholarly exactitude. Very few know that he and his associates have performed 2,670 experiments on animals, including man, and made countless observations while ever searching for some explanation of what life really is. They have decided that life is an electric phenomenon. For nine years they studied living cells. They learned that every one of the 28,000,000,000,000 (28 trillion) cells in the human body are alike in that each is a tiny electric cell. The positive pole is an ultra-minute acidic nucleus held within an oily (lipoid) film.* The rest of the cell, the cytoplasm, is slightly alkalin in reaction. Consequently a minute electric potential is set up between the acid nucleus and alkalin cytoplasm. The electrical charge accumulates on the lipoid film, breaks through, and thereby establishes electric balance between the two fluids. Immediately, however, another charge is generated. In fatigue the ability to regenerate electric potential is reduced, in exhaustion it almost ceases. In death it stops altogether. In death there is no difference, chemical or electrical, between nucleus and cytoplasm. This fact Dr. Crile noted. He noted, too, that the brain and the liver decomposed 100 times faster than the heart or voluntary muscles. So he supposed that the brain is the positive pole of the human battery (collection of cells), that the liver is the negative pole. Heart, lungs, stomach are only accessories to the electrical operation of liver and brain. He found much data to support his hypothesis, found many applications to the principles involved. Sleep permits the brain to re-establish its positive load of electricity.* Such facts pertinent to a conception of life as an electrical phenomenon, Dr. Crile, with the editorial aid of his laboratory coworker, Amy F. W. Rowland, has collated in his book, A Bipolar Theory of Living Processes, just issued by Macmillan's ($5.00). His thesis is far from dogmatic. "We concede that our thesis has not been finally proven. Final proof is lacking regarding practically every point. We concede that the bipolar theory would fail to explain living processes if any other form of energy than electric energy could be proved to be adapted to construct and operate an organism which is identical with or analagous to that of the human organism."

The metaphysical and .the religious thoughts which this electric conception of life arouses, Dr. Crile leaves to others.

*This film is fourteen-millionths of a centimeter thick. Ten million stacked like restaurant wheat cakes would be less than 1 3/4 in. high. The surface area of all the body cells is nine acres. The central nervous system contains 3,000,000,000 cells, their suface area being 91.3 sq. ft. *Two years ago, the Simmons Co., mattress and bed makers, founded a fellowship at the Mellon Institute at Pittsburgh to study the nature of sleep. Their report, based on investigations different from Dr. Crile's, will be ready soon.