SAYS HE CAN CREATE LIFE.
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Indiana Physician Affirms Microscope Shows Success of Tests.

Special to The New York Times.

RICHMOND, Ind. June 29. -- Dr. C. W. Littlefield, an Indiana physician, to-day made the positive assertion that he has succeeded in creating animal matter in the form of insect life.  This he says he has done by means of a chemical compound and by actual demonstration in his laboratory at Anderson.

Dr. Littlefield recently attracted attention by his claim to the discovery of life germs in common crystals of salt after they were subjected to a simple compound of chemicals.  Ammonia, alcohol, and distilled water added to a quantity of salt, and the whole inclosed in a glass tube for a period of about one hour created the foundation or the beginning of life, according to Dr. Littlefield.

Since that time Dr. Littlefield has sought to develop animal matter in living form, and to-day says he showed under the microscope that he had succeeded.  His next step will be to mature the species of life and determine if propagation is possible.

RESTORES THE DEAD BY A SIMPLE MEANS
________

Dr. Meltzer, at Rockefeller Institute,
"Kills" Rabbits and Brings Them Back to Life.
_____

HUMANS CAN BE SAVED
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Discoverer Says Process Should Be Used "In Each and Every Instance of Death."

Dr. Samuel J. Meltzer [German-born physiologist, Samuel James Meltzer (1851-1920)] of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, in the course of recent experiments to discover a successful method of artificial respiration, restored to life two animals which he had caused to be put to death and which were dead in the common acceptance of the term.  Both recovered entirely.  He believes the method to be equally applicable to man, and urges that it be tried in all cases of death; for it is quite possible, he asserts, that in cases of death from acute illness, the actual cause of death might be only of a temporary nature.

This laboratory worker, whose reputation is international, is known to scientists as an extremely conservative man.  His positive statements, therefore, regarding the results of his latest discovery, have created a stir in scientific circles.

It is certain that Dr. Meltzer has devised a method of artificial respiration tenfold more efficient than the older ones; and it is expected that it will be the means of saving countless lives.  It is called pharyngeal insufflation....

Briefly, the method consists of the introduction of a catheter into the pharynx, pulling out of the tongue, forcing the back part of the tongue against the roof of the mouth by pressure applied far back under the chin, putting a weight on the abdomen to keep air from being forced into the stomach, connecting the catheter with a bellows, and pumping air into the lungs.  With very little instruction the layman can learn these methods as readily as the physician....

The majority of Dr. Meltzer's experiments were carried on with animals in which respiration had been paralyzed by means of a poison named curare.  Here are some of his general remarks concerning the experiments....:

"The methods have been developed, and sufficiently tested by experimentation on four species of animals -- dogs, cats, rabbits, and two monkeys....

"The experiments were ... carried out chiefly on curarized animals....

"In several instances the artificial respiration was discontinued as long as from six to seven minutes, until the pulse disappeared completely, the ventricles showing only a faint, inefficient beat.  Nevertheless, on restoring the connections for artificial respiration, heart and circulation were restored to normal within from one and a half to two minutes.

Back to Life in a Minute.

"...These methods proved to be sufficient to keep up the respiration in cases also in which the medulla oblongata was completely destroyed or after complete abolition of respiration by intramuscular injection of large doses of magnesium sulphate....

"I have made, also, a few experiments on animals which were killed purposely either by etherization or by illuminating gas.  In these cases the pharyngeal insufflation was not instituted until all traces of respiration and heartbeats disappeared.  So far, only two recoveries can be recorded....

"My experimental studies convinced me that by means of these methods of pharyngeal insufflation artificial respiration can be kept up efficiently, and animals will be surely resuscitated from a purely respiratory death.

Causes of Death Temporary.

"Seeing no reason whatsoever why these methods should fail to accomplish similar results in human beings, I submit to physicians and surgeons my request to test the pharyngeal methods, as described here, on human beings wherever there is any need of artificial respiration; the opportunities will not be lacking....

ON THE THRESHOLD?
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The day is nearer when the physiologist will be able to create life.  Such is the substance of a message delivered before the British Association at Glasgow.  An achievement so tremendous hardly suffers from the qualification that the life which the scientist will bring into being will be of the most primitive kind, and that the creation of even so elementary an organism as the sponge would be unthinkable.  To the layman the space that separates the primordial cell from the most complex of living organisms is insignificant compared with the gulf between non-life and life.  Once that gap has been bridged, the mystery has been solved.  Man has stormed the inner citadel of nature, and the rest is only mopping-up.  But has the fortress really been taken?  In the session preceding the one when Professor DONNAN [British chemist, Frederick George Donnan (1870-1956)] made his breath-taking announcement, another scientist expressed the belief that the origin, purpose and nature of life will always remain to "tease, stimulate and humiliate us."  And this, despite the confidence of Professor EVANS [American anatomist and physiologist, Herbert McClean Evans (1882-1971)] that as science pushes deeper its probe into nature, "there will be found to be continuity between the living and non-living."

This is as much as the most materialistic of physiologists has hitherto asserted.  Continuity between the non-organic and the organic means the whole case.  If life cannot at present be explained in terms of physics and chemistry, it is because we do not know enough.  When our knowledge is complete, all the data for the explanation of life will be found in physics and chemistry, and the "vital principle" is a superfluity and a nuisance.  Such a forward stride in knowledge is now announced at Glasgow, which is asked to think of oxygen not only as the fuel of the living cell but as its architect and repair mechanic.  The approach to the great mystery is, then, through the rapprochement between physical and "vital" phenomena.  But as the outsider sees it, the gap has been made narrower as the result of give and take on both sides.  If life is being gradually restated in the formulas of the physical sciences, these sciences in turn are developing formulas that carry much of the mysticism attaching to life.  It is easier today to speak of life in material terms because matter today is on the way to becoming spiritualized.

Professor EVANS finds that matter, energy, time, space are in the melting pot.  The thing that will come out may be something comprehensive enough to embrace the living and the non-living.  Professor DONNAN believes that we shall yet learn how to describe life in precise mathematical form, "though a new form of mathematics may have been invented."  This sadly suggests that for the layman the understanding of life may not be very near.  Very few men understand the new physics, so repugnant to common sense, so dependent on a new and complicated mathematics.  But perhaps the ordinary man will be satisfied not to understand if he can see the thing done.  He knows really nothing about relativity and quantums and  the rest of the new topsy-turvy universe.  But show him a living cell created in a laboratory, and he will be shaken as never before.

DR. RIDDLE ON LIFE.

Before we ever heard of genes, hormones and vitamins a battle raged around the issue of spontaneous generation.  Did life originate all by itself?  The Victorians decided that life must always spring from life.  Latterly we have heard new doubts about the validity of this doctrine.  To Professor DIRAC [English physicist, Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac (1902-1984)] the problem of life is the problem of the atom's nucleus, "only more difficult."  Professor DONNAN, one of the ablest of organic chemists, is sure that life will be created in the laboratory when we know more about "physico-chemical relations."  And now comes Dr. OSCAR RIDDLE [American biologist and physiologist (1877-1968)] with the equally firm conviction that evolution begins not with living protoplasm, as DARWIN taught, but with inanimate matter itself.  Once more the vitalists and mechanists come to grips.

It must be admitted that the mechanists, of whom Dr. RIDDLE is one, have the better of the argument.  They can point to results -- the duplication of urea, alcohol, sugar, a thousand compounds once associated only with the living process, the miracles wrought on life processes by the hormones and the vitamins.  Yet we are as far as ever from realizing what life is.  Even Dr. W. M. STANLEY's [American biochemist, Wendell Meredith Stanley (1904-1971)] startling crystals of the mosaic disease of the tobacco plant are as inanimate as bricks in their glass containers.  Before they spring into life they must touch living cells.  So the old doctrine that life comes only from life still holds.  The mechanist is in the position of a man who argues that because a symphony can be played on a phonograph the Beethoven who composed it must have been an automaton himself.

In the absence of any satisfactory definition of life, what is the argument about?  Obviously living -- the interaction of organisms and their surroundings.  It is impossible to conceive of a living organism without its environment.  The deeper the biochemists probe into the cell the more baffling the mystery becomes.  The fertilization of the seed, the growth of the embryo, the development of the individual, the transmission of features to the next generation, adaptation to the environment, evolution of lower into higher forms -- it is this that is life, this that defies the mechanists and vitalists alike, this that leads vitalists to talk mystically and unintelligibly of "entelechy" and "biotic energy."  A bit of artificially created matter would have to ring all these changes if we are to accept it as something that lives.  Life is a progression of states.  Hence, as Professor WILDON CARR [British philosopher, Herbert Wildon Carr (1857-1931)] puts it, "what we are studying in biology is not an object at all but a history."

There is a close resemblance between the physicists and biologists.  Both seek fundamentals.  The physicist tears matter apart and discovers protons, electrons, neutrons and positrons.  But he is as far as he ever was from telling us what reality is.  The biologist gives us protein crystals that have only to touch living tissue to flame into life themselves.  But he cannot tell us what life is.  It may yet turn out that life is as eternal as matter.  To ask how it began is perhaps to ask how the universe began.

SCIENCE IN REVIEW
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Virus Torn Apart and Put Together Again,
Creating Living Organism in Laboratory
__________

By WALDEMAR KAEMPFFERT

Biochemists believe that nucleic acids are the rock bottom of life.  Without the acid (a combination of oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus) self-reproduction, as in bacteria and other cells, is impossible.  Living things are composed of proteins, and all proteins are derived from other proteins -- their fathers and mothers.  In addition to fathers and mothers, protein molecules need a midwife to be born.  The midwife is nucleic acid.

We have here the reason why biochemists like Dr. Harry [sic] Commoner [American biologist and environmentalist, Barry Commoner (1917-    )] of Washington University, St. Louis, Mo., are trying to relate nucleic acids to the living processes of the cell.  At last week's meeting of the American Chemical Society at Minneapolis, Minn., he rose to describe discoveries that he and his colleagues, Eddie Basler Jr., Tung-Yue Wang and James A. Lippincott, had made as recently as last month.  The group tore a virus apart, then put the dead parts together again and got combinations that were alive and much like the original....

This is an astounding performance.  It looks as if disease can be the consequence of an unfortunate union of a protein with the wrong nucleic acid rather than the consequence of the invasion of the body by an infectious organism.

Dr. Commoner and his colleagues worked with the virus that causes the tobacco mosaic disease.  The protein and the nucleic acid of the virus were separated.  Neither is infectious by itself.  But when James A. Lippincott put the dead protein and nucleic acid together again under Dr. Commoner's direction a living virus that was infectious resulted.

Dr. Commoner believes it is possible to combine proteins and nucleic acids in new ways.  "If such experiments prove fruitful," he said at Minneapolis, "the way will be open for experiments probing deeply into unknown areas of biological reproduction."  He added that "these results open new paths of investigation which  may ultimately result in the formation of artificial virus hybrids."  In other words, we have the possibility of producing viruses to order.  With the viruses go vaccines.  Whole new horizons in medicine are opened....

The work done in the United States and Britain is important and exciting.  Will the day arrive when a particular protein may be combined with a particular nucleic acid to form a living organism?  If so, it would be the greatest achievement in the history of science.  Life created in the laboratory -- can anything surpass that?

A KEY MOLECULE CREATED IN LAB

Ultraviolet Light Plays Role in Experiment on Coast

Special to The New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 17 -- A scientist has reported creation in the laboratory of adenosine triphosphate, a highly complex molecule.

Dr. Cyril Ponnamperuma [Sri Lankan-born chemist (1923-1995)] of the Ames Research Center of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration at Moffett Field said that the molecule was created by shining ultraviolet light on a solution of compounds thought to resemble the composition of the earth's oceans about 4,000,000,000 years ago.

"Such experiments," he said, "are lending significant support to the theory that biological molecules, which are the prerequisites of life, could have appeared by the interaction of forces and materials which existed on the earth before life did."

He said that ultraviolet light is now absorbed in the upper atmosphere, but that large amounts probably struck the earth billions of years ago.

Adenosine triphosphate (ATP) is now made by animal life by digestion of food, and by plant life through photosynthesis.  Dr. Ponnamperuma suggested that his experiments indicated that in primitive times the molecule was created without any effort for the life forms that then existed.

The goal of Dr. Ponnamperuma's research is the synthesis of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), the basic determinant for hereditary traits.  Previously he has shown that the purines in the nucleic acids, ribonucleic acid (RNA) and DNA, can be produced under prebiotic conditions.  Also he has combined adenine with ribose to get the nucleoside adenosine, another key ingredient of the nucleic acids.

The significance of the discoveries in the search for life on other planets was cited by Dr. Harold Klein at Ames Research Center.

"Previously we thought that such chemicals were peculiar to living organisms, so that if we found them on other planets we could assume the existence of life," Dr. Klein said.  "Now we know that such an assumption is incorrect -- that these chemicals may be formed in the absence of life."

GENETICIST POSES ETHICS QUESTIONS
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Is a Lab-Created Embryo Human Life? He Asks

By Harold M. Schmeck Jr.
Special to The New York Times

BAR HARBOR, Me., Aug. 12 -- Physicians and geneticists should begin now to consider the moral questions involved in growing human reproductive cells under test-tube conditions and experimenting with the artificial growth, an internationally known geneticist said here today.

The scientist, Dr. Bentley Glass [American biologist and geneticist (1906-2005)] of The Johns Hopkins University, made the remark in the course of a lecture on the use of cell cultures for research in genetics.

He noted that the ability to grow both male and female reproductive cells in tissue culture could produce worthwhile scientific knowledge, but that this would also lead to moral questions and predicaments that scientists ought to be considering....

To date, only somatic cells -- ordinary body cells such as those in skin and other animal and human tissues -- have been grown under these conditions.  However, Dr. Glass said, it is a reasonable expectation that the filed will expand to include growth of reproductive system cells -- the precursors of male cells and female egg cells, for example.

A next logical step would be to put artificially grown sperm and egg together, thus starting the growth of an embryo.  This in turn would raise many questions:  Is one dealing with a human life in such a cell culture?  Can one justifiably experiment with it?  How does one dispose of it at the end of the experiment?....

Dr. Glass said the present pace of developments in tissue culture techniques made it seem reasonable that artificial human embryonic growth in the laboratory might be possible before the end of this century.  Such an embryo would not, presumably, be capable of growing through its full course under such conditions, but it might be maintained for a substantial period of time....

SCIENCE MAY PATENT NEW FORMS OF LIFE,
JUSTICES RULE, 5 TO 4

DISPUTE ON BACTERIA
________

Decision Assists Industry in Bioengineering in a Variety of Projects

By LINDA GREENHOUSE
Special to The New York Times

WASHINGTON, June 16 -- The Supreme Court ruled today, 5 to 4, that new forms of life created in the laboratory are eligible for patents under current patent law.

The decision, upholding the award of a patent for a new bacterium that "digests" oil spills, opens the way for patent protection for the rapidly burgeoning field of genetic engineering....

In enacting the patent laws, Chief Justice Burger wrote for the majority, Congress created a distinction "not between living and inanimate things, but between products of nature, whether living or not, and human-made inventions."....