Month: September 2022

THE CORE. “Protoplasm. All life is composed of this substance. It is life!” http://www.jstor.org/stable/42581616 View in LinkedIn

THE MASSIVE OUTLIER. “A virus has no protoplasm. It has no plasma membrane. It has no ongoing metabolic processes.” https://lnkd.in/d8QX9Pb View in LinkedIn

THE HEART OF LIFE. “Protoplasm had been elevated to become the foundation of life by Thomas Henry Huxley and Ernst Haeckel...protoplasm enjoyed special status in biology. Huxley, Haeckel, and many others viewed it as the fundamental stuff of life. Investigating its properties, especially its motion, was akin to searching for the basis of life itself.” https://lnkd.in/dHJuR96 View in LinkedIn

SIMILAR BUT DIFFERENT. “Cat protoplasm and dog protoplasm are not alike; protoplasm of the corn leaf differs from the protoplasm of the oak leaf; indeed the protoplasm of different parts of the same organism differ to some extent...yet in spite if this, the fundamental nature of all kinds of protoplasm is the same.” http://www.jstor.org/stable/42581616 View in LinkedIn

BEYOND CHEMISTRY ALONE. “Protoplasm refers to a mixture of chemicals that can collectively use sources of energy and chemical building blocks in a suitable environment to synthesize or assimilate more of the same set of chemicals.” https://lnkd.in/dq_dKJk View in LinkedIn

AN ACT OF CHARITY. “It is perhaps more foolhardy than courageous to assert that an almost universally used term is meaningless. Yet such an assertion I make here. I believe that a careful consideration of the term protoplasm will convince the unprejudiced judge that its various assigned meanings are so contradictory and have such uncertain reference to facts that to call the term meaningless is no more than an act of simple charity.” http://www.jstor.org/stable/42581616 View in LinkedIn

PUBLIC VIEW. “In November of 1940, Time magazine celebrated the “primordial heartbeat” manifest in the “pulse of protoplasm” from the lowly slime mold, Physarum polycephalum.” http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jipb.12317/full View in LinkedIn

SLIME MOLD PULSES. “Physarum polycephalum. “Contraction occurs when the fibrils are formed, and it ends when the fibrils dissociate.” https://lnkd.in/dNsAwef View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this first of two weekends on the subject of protoplasm. Although its fine structure has been elucidated further, it still remains a rather mysterious substance, backed by a biological lore that is almost mystical, pure food for the Vitalists. It is hard not to have sympathy with Vitalists when contemplating this marvelous stuff, by whose fine structure proximate chemistry in vitro in buffered solutions with pure reagents would not occur. View in LinkedIn