Old-Fashioned

(See Cover)

This week California's Stanford University holds a centennial celebration to commemorate one of the greatest events in the history of science: the discovery that cells are the basic units of all living tissue. Until this principle was established it was no more possible for biology to progress than for chemistry to progress without knowledge of the atom.

Stanford's special celebration is a meeting. It is not a mass meeting of laymen nor a big crowded convention like last week's meeting in Milwaukee of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, at which almost any academic Tom, Dick or Harry could put in his 2-c- worth.

Just 16 men are to appear, top-flight biologists and physicists all, at a symposium. In one room they will sit as on a sort of scientific Olympus, and each will make a formal statement of the most interesting truths he knows about biological cells and protoplasm. Then they will swap ideas and comments and, inevitably, some of them will, in the most abstruse scientific terms, call some others liars.

The 16 Olympians include Albert de Szent-Gyoergyi, the Hungarian Nobel Prizewinner who found vitamin C in paprika; Wendell Meredith Stanley of Rockefeller Institute, who succeeded in crystallizing a virus; Frits Went of California Institute of Technology, No. 1 U. S. researcher on plant hormones. There is just one mildly disturbing thing about the assembly. One of the most distinguished of the 16*--one whose solid scientific achievements are no greater than those of some others but who stands out because he is a notable leader of science, teacher of science, preacher of science, historian of science, analyst of science and critic of science--Edwin Grant Conklin of Princeton, will tell the others that the centenary they are celebrating is a scientific fraud.

Schleiden and Schwann. In 1839 in Germany lived two scientists, Mathias Schleiden and his follower, Theodore Schwann. In his publication on the cell issued at that time, Schleiden made this statement: "Each cell leads a double life: an independent one pertaining to its own development alone, and another, incidental insofar as it has become an integral part of the plant. It is, however, apparent that the vital process of the individual cell must form the very first, absolutely indispensable basis of ... physiology."

Many a textbook since then has honored Schleiden and Schwann as the first to postulate that the cell is a fundamental unit of life. Some time ago Joseph Meyer, a consultant at the Library of Congress, conceived the idea of a great centenary celebration in honor of Schleiden and Schwann and of the discovery of the cell theory in 1839. Hence Stanford's symposium.

There is nothing that Biologist Conklin wants less than to spoil the celebration. But as a scholar and scientist he is an uncompromising iconoclast. So he thinks it only fair to make the point that the cell theory was set afoot not in 1839 but during the previous 170 years, not by Herren Schleiden and Schwann but by a number of men almost nobody knows.

Brag or Fight. Robert Hooke was an able, mechanically talented scientist who suffered the misfortune to be a 17th-Century contemporary of the great Isaac ("Falling Apple") Newton. He was embittered by having to live in the shadow of Newton's greater glory. But frustrated Robert Hooke saw, named, described and pictured living cells, and he appears to have been the first to do so. Thereafter numbers of other scientists saw and studied cells.** For a long time the mysterious little chambers of life were called by various names, such as "vesicles," "utricles" and "globules." Then Hooke's original name, "cell," came back into use, and stuck. By the time Schleiden and Schwann appeared on the scene, cells had been identified as independent units, one-celled plants had been discovered, the nucleus (G.H.Q. of a cell's organization) had been found, and the cell's method of reproduction (by division) ascertained.

Biologist Conklin remarks that Schleiden's theory of cell development was cockeyed in major respects, and he had an unpleasantly cavalier way of dealing with contemporaries and predecessors, some of whom were right where he was wrong. Schwann took over some of Schleiden's views and from error compounded further error.

Says Historian Conklin: "I once heard a distinguished physiologist say that there are two ways to gain recognition, either brag or fight. It seems to me that Schleiden did both."

There is no malice in this. It is just Dr. Conklin's tart way of speaking. He regards science as a vast cooperative enterprise in which it is difficult to find the real beginning of anything, and he is sure that too many textbooks attach personal labels to epochal discoveries. No one has the faintest idea who invented the wheel, the pulley, the boat, the sail. And who really invented those later marvels, the friction match, the barometer, the airplane, the steamboat?

Nature of the Man. Among great modern scientists Edwin Grant Conklin stands out by being oldfashioned. He began his academic career as a country schoolteacher, dispensing all knowledge in the rural scholastic grab bag and performing as janitor to boot. Born during the Civil War in Waldo, Ohio, son of a country doctor, he almost entered the Methodist ministry but plumped for science instead. Ohio Wesleyan gave him his A.B. and A.M., Johns Hopkins his Ph.D. After teaching biology for 20 years at Ohio Wesleyan and elsewhere, he was summoned to Princeton in 1908.

The wonder of life never paled for Professor Conklin. When he taught undergraduates and flashed images of microscopic plants and animals on a stereopticon screen, Conklin himself looked at them with open-mouthed awe. At the close of their senior year he always advised his students to get married the day after graduation. From 1908, he stayed at Princeton, ripening not only in years, but--as many other old-fashioned teachers do not--in wisdom and prestige.

Conklin is primarily an embryologist, whose chief scientific work was done with such material as the eggs of the sea squirt and of a little mollusc named Crepidula. But he got his start in science before extreme specialization was as fashionable as it is today. So he is something of a jack-of-all-biology. Perhaps for the same reason he has the kind of extra-level head which men who are not specialists sometimes have. No dodo, despite his amiable nature, he has a merry tongue which articulates scientific problems with what the contemporaries of his younger days called witticisms. His present contemporaries call them cracks.

His cracks are well remembered, for although he is not disputatious as scientists go, he has an unusual record for getting into scientific controversies, usually on the unpopular side of a question. He has an even more unusual record of emerging from such controversies with 1) a crack that demolished his opponents and 2) agreement by scientific opinion that he was right from the beginning.

Nature of the Egg. One of the first such controversies in which he engaged was over the widely held notion of late 19th-Century science that a fertilized egg before starting to grow by cleavage (cell division)--and even for a time afterwards --was just so much undifferentiated raw material of life--like a lump of butter, or a pile of butter balls. Indeed one biologist did compare the early cleavage cells to "balls in a pile," and pronounced the act of cleavage at this stage to be "a mere sundering of homogeneous materials capable of any fate." The start of localized function--of specific organs with different jobs to do--was believed to occur later in embryonic development.

Early in the 20th Century, peering through his microscope at the eggs of little marine animals called sea squirts (a diagram of a sea squirt egg appears beside him on TIME'S cover), Dr. Conklin upset this notion. He found differentiated tissue regions which later gave rise to the outer skin, the middle skin, the inner skin and the main trunk of the nervous system--carried the origin of organs all the wayback to the egg.

Conklin proved his point by putting sea squirt embryos into centrifuges (whirling machines) and literally turning them inside out. Result: he developed embryo sea squirts with eyes in their innards and spinal cords outside their skins.

Acquired Characteristics. In 1896 Conklin got into another big scientific row. He was asked to take part in a Philadelphia symposium on "The Factors of Organic Evolution." He was then only 33 and rather bashful about appearing before his elders, but, being urged, he accepted. He was pitted in debate against a booming bigwig, Professor Edward Drinker Cope of University of Pennsylvania, who advanced the Lamarckian view that acquired characteristics (e.g., muscular development or manual skill) can be inherited. Conklin defended the opposite view, boldly stated that inherited characteristics are determined solely by the germ plasm. In the course of time biology gave him the palm over Bigwig Cope. Today almost all top-notch biologists have swept Lamarckism under the rug. A Conklin crack:

"Wooden legs are not inherited--but wooden heads may be."

The Darwin Divide. Many scientists engaged in the controversy between biology and Mrs. Grundy over Darwin. Conklin was one of the few to do so who had a background of youthful religious fervor. He plumped for Darwinism early, tried to show reasonable Christians that there was no threat from evolutionary doctrine to a practical religion based on Faith, Hope & Charity and the Golden Rule. (Today his religion is a sort of altruistic, pantheistic idealism.) His feeling for religion did not cause him to spare his opponents a crack:

"Apparently the anti-evolutionist demands to see a monkey or an ass transformed into a man, though he must be familiar enough with the reverse process."

Second Division. After the first division between laymen and churchmen over Darwin came a second division between scientists who did not question that evolution was a fact. The Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection declined in scientific favor. This "eclipse of Darwinism" began in the 19th Century, reached into the 20th. The tendency was to doubt that natural selection--the slow combing out and accumulation of small variations--could carry the whole burden of evolution. Many scientists grew so contemptuous of natural selection that they called it pure fiction. Darwin knew nothing of the Mendelian heredity laws, nothing about the mechanism of mutations (sudden, conspicuous changes in plants and animals which subsequently breed true because of changes in the germ plasm). With the discovery of mutations some biologists decided that nothing else was necessary for evolution.

Dr. Conklin stuck steadfastly to Darwinian natural selection (with the addition of mutations to work on), and still does after 55 years. Others who once thought he was wrong now admit he was right. His good friend, Caltech's famed Thomas Hunt Morgan, once an extreme proponent of the mutation theory, now admits that evolution cannot work without natural selection. But Conklin has had to take cracks in return from his friend Morgan. Remembering Conklin's famous mollusc studies, when the first Conklin daughter was born, Dr. Morgan suggested naming her Crepidula.***

Six Days a Week. At 75, Conklin's eyes are pouched and weary behind their spectacles, his hands are brown and gnarled. But he still has the same temperament, as can be seen in his championing scientific underdog Robert Hooke. Moreover, his step is firm, his voice vigorous, and his tall figure is neither gaunt nor flabby. He retired from the Princeton faculty and became a professor emeritus six years ago, but that is a sort of pious hoax. He is as active as ever.

Five hours' sleep are enough for him. In the evenings he reads voraciously--classics, new books, magazines, newspapers --and goes to bed after midnight. He smokes pipes, cigars, cigarets, occasionally takes a drink. Sometimes he gives up smoking for the sake of his health, which is excellent, but his family soon persuades him to start again for the sake of his temper, which is excellent when he has something to smoke. On the radio he listens to practically nothing except Comedian Eddie Cantor.

In the summer Professor Conklin goes to Woods Hole, Mass., which has the best-equipped laboratory of marine biology in the world. In Princeton, he gets up every morning at six. Two mornings a week he tramps, in good weather and bad, the three-quarter mile from his red-roofed stucco house to his book-lined workshop in Guyot Hall. He also lectures regularly to graduate students. And, four mornings a week, he hops the 7:45 train to Philadelphia and goes to the headquarters of the American Philosophical Society.

This venerable body, founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1727, became suddenly rich in 1931 when Dr. Richard Alexander Fullerton Penrose of Philadelphia, geologist and mining engineer, left it nearly $5,000,000. It distributes income from this hoard as grants in aid of U. S. research. President of A. P. S. is Roland Sletor Morris, onetime U. S. Ambassador to Japan. Mr. Morris is a busy man. He has a law practice, teaches international law at University of Pennsylvania, is interested in sociology, Pennsylvania politics, collecting U. S. debts from Russia. Three years ago he asked Conklin to take over supervision of A. P. S.'s multitudinous affairs. Result: Edward Grant Conklin at 75 is an active executive as well as a teacher and scientist.

Don't Blame the Devil. Dr. Conklin's biological range is wide. His fattest book is on the general subject of Heredity & Environment. This has been translated into French, Russian and Japanese. The Russians, like Dr. Morgan, had a joke at his expense: since formal genetics is a touchy subject in Soviet ideology (TIME, June 26), the Russians deleted page after page that did not suit the party line, then sent him a complimentary copy of his own book, mutilated as well as pirated.

But outside of biology proper his preoccupations range from the ethics of science to the meaning of life, from democracy to educational psychology. It is characteristic that he does not go to California this week merely to take part in Stanford's symposium on the cell. In San Francisco next week he is scheduled to address the National Education Association on "Education for Democracy."

His views on that subject are that the best education occupies a middle ground between old-fashioned education for discipline and the newfangled education for fun. In education he sees a mental and spiritual analogy of embryology: growth as a series of responses to proper stimuli. Habits arise from repeated responses to a stimulus, and the inculcation of socially useful habits is a major function of education. On the relation of Europe's present troubles to thinking habits, Dr. Conklin says:

"The present world crisis is not due to bad heredity, nor to inexorable nature, nor to the Devil, but to bad education in cultivating habits of fear, intolerance and hate of alien individuals and races, of foreign religions, nations and ideologies. The peace and progress of mankind depend on the acquiring of habits that make for peace and progress."

Of education in general he cracks: "To be fit for life in society, every child, as well as every dog, must be housebroken."

*The rest: Robert Chambers of New York University; Irving Widmer Bailey of Harvard; Herbert Spencer Jennings of Johns Hopkins; Richard Benedikt Goldschmidt and Charles Atwood Kofoid of the University of California; Charles Manning Child and Cornelis Barnardus van Niel of Stanford; Ross Granville Harrison of Yale; Hugo Theorell of the University of Stockholm; Olenus Lee Sponsler of the University of California at Los Angeles; Lewis Victor Heilbrunn of the University of Pennsylvania; John Desmond Bernal of the University of London. **Including Grew, Malpighi, Leuwenhoek, Wolff, Mirbel, Lamarck, Dutrochet, Meyen, von Mohl, Brown, Purldnje, Brogniart, Braur, Turpin, Dumortier.

***Dr. Conklin rubbed his chin, named her Mary. She is now Mrs. Samuel Masland, wife of a Towson, Md. electrical contractor.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.