Animals as Good as Plants

To a limited degree, animals have the power, hitherto believed unique in plants, of making starch and sugar foods out of carbon dioxide and water. This startling news was announced last week in Chicago by Harvard Biochemist Albert Baird Hastings, Birgit Vennesland and co-workers at a meeting of the American Societies for Experimental Biology.

Their discovery was made with the new biological technique: use of mildly radioactive substances as food. These can be traced through the body by detection of the rays which they give off. (In the past, scientists have lost track of food after it left the alimentary canal.) The Harvard biochemists fed radioactive baking soda to rats, found that the carbon dioxide in it was being used in the liver to build carbohydrates.

In plants this process is achieved by a catalyst, chlorophyll, which uses energy from sunlight to make the food on which all life, plant and animal, depends. In this sense, the animal world has always been considered a great parasite upon the plant world. The catalyzing enzymes in the liver, equivalent of chlorophyll in plants, are still undiscovered, but the new discovery indicates that, although man is parasitic, he is at least not 100% so.

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