Word: kamiya
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Unobtrusively last year into Dr. Seifriz' laboratory glided a fragile, gracious, 27-year-old Japanese scientist, Noburo Kamiya. This gifted young man had done postgraduate work in botany at Tokyo's Imperial University, was studying at Giessen in Germany in the fateful summer of 1939. When Germany invaded Poland, the Japanese Government ordered Kamiya to get out. Not stopping for books or clothing, he left posthaste for the U. S. by way of Hamburg and Bergen. He wrote to Dr. Seifriz, asking if he could go to work in his laboratory. Seifriz welcomed him. "First thing...
...When Kamiya had seen with his own eyes the rhythmic throb of Physarum, a question leaped into his mind: "What is the horsepower, what is the amount of force involved?" To find out, he devised a new experiment. To perform it, he takes a little piece of the mold, works it into a sort of dumbbell shape-two blobs connected by a thin strand. He puts this into an air chamber divided into two compartments by a block of agar (marked C in the diagram). The two blobs, a and b, are in separate chambers but are connected...
...pressure in B is kept constant; in A, it can be raised or lowered at will. When the pressure is the same in both compartments, rhythmic streaming occurs normally through the strand. But by raising the air pressure in A, Kamiya can slow down and stop the flow of material from b to a. When the flow has stopped, he has balanced air pressure against the protoplasmic force. Thus, by noting the amount of the increased pressure, he measures the protoplasmic force...
...When Kamiya plots the rise and fall of the protoplasmic force on a graph, he gets elegant curves. These excite the admiration of Seifriz, who exclaims: "Did you ever see such perfect curves? Nothing like it has ever been done before. It makes biology an exact science!" Furthermore, Kamiya has noted definite changes in the wave forms and amplitudes of his curves. This he takes to mean that Physarum has not just one rhythm but several rhythms acting together. In other words the life throb of the slime mold is not just a simple drumbeat; it is an orchestration...