Science: Old-Fashioned

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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¢ 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-Györgyi, 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.