HISTORY OF BIOLOGY: ON VITALISM

[FMMcNeill]

HISTORY OF BIOLOGY: ON VITALISM
The roots of what is called "vitalism", the idea that living
things possess a mysterious force or property that differentiates
them from non-living things, can probably be traced back to
Aristotle and beyond. But the modern origin is perhaps the
proposal by the chemist J.J. Berzelius (1779-1848) in 1807 that
chemical substances be divided into "organic" and "inorganic",
with organic substances those that are the products of organisms
and inorganic substances those characteristic of the inanimate
world. This, of course, is not the distinction between these
terms today, but in the early 19th century, Berzelius and many
other chemists believed that organic substances could be produced
_only_ by living systems, the limitation due to a special
mysterious vital property of living systems. This idea of the
unique production of organic substances by living systems, the
idea of "chemical vitalism", was demolished experimentally by
Friedrich Wohler (1800-1882), who in 1828 synthesized urea from
ammonium cyanate [*Note #1].
The notion of chemical vitalism persisted for a few decades,
in large part due to support by Berzelius, but by the 1850s most
chemists had abandoned the idea. However, a related vitalism,
"biological vitalism", continued well into the early 20th century
in various forms, some researchers with a focus on biological
cells, other researchers with a focus on complex higher organisms
and their functions, and still other biologists with a focus on
embryological development.
Concerning vitalism in cell biology, its persistence is
perhaps easily explained by a simple little experiment: We
consider a single-celled microscopic organism, a primitive living
entity, let us say a relatively non-motile protozoan, in an
aqueous solution. The aqueous solution containing the organism
fills a small chamber, and we observe the organism with a
microscope. Into the chamber we introduce two glass micro-
needles, and manipulating these micro-needles, we carefully tear
the surface of the cell until the interior contents burst into
the surrounding solution. We have destroyed the organism and are
left with its parts in the chamber, a trivial conclusion,
although not trivial for the protozoan. What is also not trivial
is that although all the contents of that once-living organism
are still in that chamber, there is no possible way presently
known to science to reconstitute that organism from its parts as
a "living" entity. It will not happen spontaneously, and there is
no way known to us that we can accomplish it.
In the latter half of the 19th century, and well into the
20th century, many biologists, observing the life and death of
living systems, and ignorant of modern ideas concerning molecular
biology and irreversible processes and metastable states and the
dynamics of self-organizing ensembles, believed that living cells
and living organisms composed of such cells possessed a vital
force of some kind that was responsible for "life". Today, on the
contrary, nearly all biologists believe this is not the case, and
that a mature living cell (and a living organism composed of such
cells) is a result of programmed serial organization, with each
step in organization (development) dependent on the previous
steps, so that if at any stage, or at the final stage, the
organism is destroyed, it will not spontaneously be
reconstituted, and we cannot in practice reconstitute the
organism by any direct or indirect means, since what must be
reconstituted is a culminating organization based on a serial
organization, the serial organization the cascade of specific
sequential organizations that led to the stage at which the
organism was destroyed. The current view, therefore, at least
among most biologists, is that a "living system" is a special
arrangement of non-living material, that the arrangement and
material obey the laws of physics and chemistry, and that no
special "vital force" exists in living things. This view was most
succinctly stated by the Nobel laureate biologist Jacques Lucien
Monod (1910-1976): "There are living systems, there is no `living
matter'."
... ... Sunetra Gupta (University of Oxford, UK) presents an
essay on Berzelius and vitalism, the author making the following
points:
1) The author suggests that vitalism's singular place in
history rests on its attempt to reconcile two opposing needs --
the need for analytical reasoning and the need to celebrate the
mystery of human experience. The life of the Swedish chemist Jon
Jacob Berzelius traced the tensions between these concerns in
dramatic detail.
2) After Wohler's demonstration in 1828 that urea could be
synthesized from ammonium cyanate, Berzelius maintained a
dignified silence on the question of vitalism, leaving doubt
concerning what the discovery meant to him personally. During
Berzelius' long life in chemistry, he vacillated between
positions clearly supportive of a mystical vitalist force and
others more appropriate to an atheistic materialism, which
Berzelius generally abhorred. It appears that much of the
energies of Berzelius as a chemist were engaged in an honest
negotiation of a compromise between these two poles.
3) Berzelius, in his final analysis, acknowledged that the
notion of a vital force as distinct from normal inorganic forces
was invalid. Instead, he proposed that organisms were to be
distinguished by a mysterious arrangement of "circumstances"
dictated by the divine purpose of producing life. By the early
20th century, the focus of vitalism had shifted to another set of
circumstances, the development of an organism. Known as
"entelechy", the concept that a vital force accounts not only for
the maintenance of life but also for its development was used by
the vitalist Hans Driesch (1867-1941) to explain the apparently
astonishing process of embryonic differentiation.
4) The author (Gupta) concludes: "We now have a 'working
draft' of the human genome and still the engineers of such a feat
are anxious to emphasize 'the imponderables of the human spirit'.
It seems that we are still -- perhaps happily so -- trapped in a
state of poetic ambivalence towards the question of whether life
is greater than the sum of its parts. Like Berzelius, we remain
inclined to believe that the analysis of life does not detract
from its ultimate mystery."
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Sunetra Gupta: A victim of truth.
(Nature 12 Oct 00 407:677)
QY: Sunetra Gupta, Dept. of Zoology, University of Oxford, UK.
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Text Notes:
... ... *Note #1: J.J. Berzelius (1779-1848) was perhaps the most
prominent chemist of the first half of the 19th century. First
trained as a physician, Berzelius accurately determined more than
2000 relative atomic and molecular masses; devised the system of
chemical symbols and formulae now in use; proposed oxygen as a
reference standard for atomic masses; discovered the elements
cerium, selenium, and thorium; was the first to prepare silicon
in an amorphous form; was the first to isolate zirconium; coined
the words "isomerism", "allotropy", and "protein"; coined the
term "halogens" to describe the group chlorine, bromine, and
iodine; was the first to postulate the existence of catalysts.
His _Textbook of Chemistry_ (1803), published when he was 24
years of age, came to be accepted as the definitive work of his
time. Reaching a senior age, Berzelius stated: "God knows what
happens to your time once you have begun to get old. You are busy
all the time, you do important things, you work, and yet when you
sum it all up the result is nothing."
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Summary & Notes by SCIENCE-WEEK http://scienceweek.com 10Nov00
For more information: http://scienceweek.com/swfr.htm
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Related Background:
IN FOCUS: HISTORY OF BIOLOGY: ON 19TH CENTURY VITALISM
"The term 'vitalism' can be applied in one form or another to the
thinking of the majority of the scientists concerned with any
biological subject during most of the nineteenth century.
However, this does not mean that all held the same theory. Rather
it signifies that sooner or later each scientist reached a level
of speculation as to the mechanisms of the living organism at
which he could no longer explain these mechanisms with the facts
at his disposal. The point at which this level was reached
differed in individual cases, but the fact seemingly could not be
denied that there was a distinction between the inorganic and the
organic worlds; the unorganized and the organized as the
distinction was often expressed. After the popularization of the
idea of a vital force by Barthez (1734-1806), the term came to
cover a multitude of concepts. To some it represented an actual
substance characteristic of life, to others it was a force which
operated on the inorganic elements to give them unique properties
when it acted. Probably the best statement of the general
situation was the remark of Berzelius (1779-1848): 'We make use
of a _word_ to which we can affix no idea.'... After Liebig
(1803-1873), the structural theory of organic chemistry made
possible the synthesis of thousands of new compounds and an
understanding of mechanisms of their reactions. Chemists no
longer saw the need for a vital force. The German school of
physiologists, Temkin's 'mechanical materialists', discarded
vitalism completely and turned to the rapidly advancing science
of physics for an explanation of vital mechanisms. For them man
became 'but a passing constellation of lifeless particles of
matter.' It cannot be said that vitalism was completely
extinguished. Even in the twentieth century Hans Driesch (1867-
1941) continued to insist that the function of protoplasm could
not be explained mechanically. However, with the accumulating
mass of chemical and physiological information, vitalism did
gradually disappear from biological thought."
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Henry M. Leicester: _Development of Biochemical Concepts from
Ancient to Modern Times_
(Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA 1974, p.150,159)
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SCIENCE-WEEK http://scienceweek.com 3Dec99
For more information: http://scienceweek.com/swfr.htm