The Fastest Growth on Earth

In the beginning was vestureless life. It was the capacity for self perpetuation and growth in nature, the property of a single complex chemical mixture—protoplasm.

This protoplasm may have come here from another star, a single grain of cosmic dust blown out of the infinite. It may have been mixed by chance in the warm seas of the earth at the beginning of time. It may have been put together according to the design of some cosmic intelligence. It tended to segregate into billions of trillions of infinitesimally minute particles, each sufficient unto itself. The particles were purposeless, voracious, irresistible and immortal. They threatened to devour space and time and all that was in them.

A cell culture of elemental, inchoate life stuff whose original substance increased theoretically 10,000,000,000,000,000,000-fold in forty weeks has been described by Dr. Phillip R. White of the Rockefeller Institute. In his experiments he started with a pellet about the size of a grain of mustard seed cut from a wart-like excrescence on a tobacco plant. He watched it multiply until, arithmetically speaking, if no part had been discarded it would have been an unorganized, purposeless monster spheroid of life 600,000,000 miles in diameter, comparable in size to the whole solar system inside the orbit of Pluto.

It had twelve weeks to complete its first year. At the same rate of growth it then would have been a lusty infant the size of 400,000 solar systems. In a few more weeks it could have swallowed the whole Milky Way galaxy. By the end of its second year it would have filled all the space in known creation, consumed the substance of all the galaxies, and perished of starvation as it bulged outward into the emptiness of infinity.

Such a nightmare actually happened, in reverse. Dr. White had to do everything in a few test tubes, but he was able to witness such a phenomenon of growth as man had not hitherto imagined. First he placed his pellet in a special nutrient solution. It began to expand by the continuous process of splitting in two. Two cells become four, four eight, and so on infinitely. After about two weeks Dr. White cut away a few pellets from the original mass and discarded the rest. These were placed in new nutrient solutions. Every two weeks the experimenter would discard the bulk of each mass which had accumulated and start new cultures with the few pellets which he saved. Each culture increased in size about fifty percent a day. At the end of forty weeks he was left with something not much bigger than he had at the start, but the actual original pellet constituted only about a ten-quintillionth of the final mass.

He happened to have found in the tobacco excrescences an undifferentiated kind of life. The cells had no specialized function. In the actual plant they were kept in order by the rest of the plant cell community, which has no use for cells with no job to do. Once in the nutrient solution, however, they were free of all inhibiting influences. They were not, and never became, wood cells, bark cells, pith cells, leaf cells or any of the other numerous, specialized kinds of cells which make up the plant world. They were something very close to the primaeval plant cells from which, in the course of a couple of billion years, all the others have been derived. Very early these unit structures of life learned that they must stick together and do specialized jobs for each other under the actual conditions of nature. Out of these combinations of specialists has arisen all the magnificent structure of the living world.

But the experimental cells at the Rockefeller Institution had nothing to do except eat and multiply. Each of them was potentially immortal. It did not die but renewed its youth when it had reached its growth by becoming two baby cells. That is how life might have developed from the beginning except for the fact that a cell must eat to live and ordinarily does not have any accommodating scientist to feed it.