Midwinter Advancement

U. S. scientists make publicity hay when the sun shines most feebly--during the Christmas-New Year holidays. High lights of the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting last week in Richmond:*

Hooke's Cells. Robert Hooke (1635-1703) probably suffered from a mild case of paranoia. A brilliant British scientist, he had many ideas, carried few of them through to solid achievement. He invented a wheel barometer, conceived the idea of using a pendulum as a measure of gravity, helped famed Robert ("Boyle's Law") Boyle make his air pump. He clearly conceived the motion of heavenly bodies as a mechanical problem, but his conception was almost obliterated in the glory of Isaac Newton's formulation of the gravity laws. He was jealous of Newton, made violent attacks on him, resented all his life the fact that Newton's reputation far outshone his own.

If Robert Hooke's ghost had been in Richmond last week it would have heard something very gratifying. Edwin Grant Conklin, Princeton's famed biologist, declared that it was a mistake to attribute the origin of the biological cell theory, whose centenary is being observed in scientific circles, to two Germans, Schleiden and Swann. "Their theory," said Dr. Conklin, "was a special and in important respects an erroneous one. There is no present biological interest in their theory. . . . Cells were first seen, named, described and figured by Robert Hooke ... 170 years before the work of Schleiden and Swann. Hooke . . . described among many other things the little chambers or cells which he had seen with his simple microscope in sections of cork."

Pacemaker. Most biologists believe that the evolution of higher organisms works through genes--tiny little somethings (probably protein molecules) strung along the chromosomes in the germ plasm. Thousands of genes controlling various body characteristics have been traced in Drosophila melanogaster, the scientifically celebrated little fruit fly. It is by changes in these genes that evolution of different types of organisms takes place. But last week Dr. Millislav Demerec of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Genetics announced his opinion-- based on careful research--that chromosomes contain one gene, which, by affecting all the genes, speeds up the rate of evolutionary change. It may be due to this single "pacemaker" gene that the evolution of higher organisms has required only hundreds of millions of years instead of billions, as it might have if organic changes had to wait on time and chance for changes in thousands of genes.

Electron Microscopes now attract much attention among scientists who want to see ever smaller & smaller things. The magnification of ordinary microscopes is limited by the wave nature of light. Some things are so small that they slip through the meshes of the light rays like BB shot through a tennis net. Instead of a beam of light the electron microscope utilizes a beam of electrons, which have wave lengths thousands of times shorter than visible light but also make impressions on photographic plates.

In Germany this year a "super-microscope" of this sort was announced (TIME, June 6). In the issue of the British journal Nature which reached the U. S. last week was a picture taken by Professor L. C. Martin of London's Imperial College which showed a germ called Micrococcus flavus magnified 16,000 times. Last week in Richmond, Dr. Vladimir Kosma Zworykin of RCA Manufacturing Co. showed fluorescent-screen projections, made with his electron microscope, of tungsten crystals in which the molecules themselves could be distinguished in the molecular structure.

At the American Physical Society's meeting in Washington:

Sun Explosion? Standard theory for the origin of the sun's cohort of planets is that the material which formed them was pulled from the sun by the tidal action of a passing star. Dr. Ross Gunn of the Naval Research Laboratory has worked out the dynamics of a new theory which he last week presented. He believes that the sun, like hundreds of "novae" (exploding stars) which astronomers have studied, lost its balance, figuratively speaking, some two or three billion years ago and blew up, hurling out planetary material before subsiding to its smaller and comparatively placid state of today.

* For medical news from the convention, see P. 36.

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