Word: bacteria
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Guessers about the origin of life on Earth last week hearkened when a distinguished Californian announced the discovery of bacteria in meteorites. For lack of precise facts, some guessers have placed life, with meteors, sunshine, starshine and cosmic rays, as an extramundane intrusion. Professor Charles Bernard Lipman, the booming, moon-faced plant-physiologist who is dean of the University of California's graduate division, now thinks such guessers have been correct. From several sources he acquired meteorites (meteors which landed intact on Earth). These he doused, scrubbed, seared and otherwise sterilized, then pulverized in sterile mortars. The dust...
Three years ago when Professor Lipman found crystals in lifeless agar-agar taking the forms of living bacteria, he boomed: "It is fascinating and irresistible to speculate as to whether or not these artificial bacilli may, under the proper environmental conditions, take on the properties of living cells...
Last week he boomed about his meteoritic bacteria: "I realize, of course, that the experiments and conclusions will be challenged by competent critics and probably more so by critics who are not competent...
...anticipate skeptics, Professor Lipman last week noted that he found enough organic nitrogen in his meteoric specimens to sustain the life of a few bacteria: that bacteria can endure intense cold; that the heat generated by a meteorite passing through the Earth's atmosphere is not enough to kill sealed-in bacteria because the passage occurs so quickly that the interior of the meteorite is relatively cool though the outside is white...
...Antony van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723), unlearned Dutch merchant's clerk, was first man to recognize bacteria and protozoa with a microscope. But not until Louis Pasteur did anyone explain the meaning of Leeuwenhoek's "little animals." Last year Clifford Dobell, English protistologist (student of unicellular organisms), nephew of the man who invented Dobell's Solution, after learning 17th Century Dutch to interpret bad contemporary Latin translations of Leeuwenhoek's unscientific Dutch, published a Leeuwenhoek biography (Harcourt, Brace, $7.50). Its Latin dedication translates: "This work of a dead Dutchman the English editor (as an animalcule...