LIFE DROPS

Evening Star, Issue 19794, 18 February 1928, Page 14

LIFE DROPS

m ME BUTCHERS Bacon and eggs, tea, toast, and marmalade, the familiar breakfast of millions of people, is to disappear: roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, and baked potatoes will bo a thing of the past if the amazing forecast of Sir Philip Gibbs, in the ‘Sunday Chronicle,’ comes true. Two searching questions must be put and answered. First of all: Is is good for men and women to let the' scientists experiment with their bodies and brains? Will it not lead to great dangers, and be an outrage against some Divine law in Nature which will lead us to a new form of hell, here or hereafter ? Will it not put our very souls into the hands of the scientists, who in the future may bo evil men—as some are now—who "may be the paid servants of some frightful Scientific State which has control over the bodies of men and women, or maybe the actual dictators of that State? Secondly: Do we want to live much longer, even if we have the power to prolong life? How terrible it would be to live to the age of a hundred and fifty—and why stop at that?—if we could not find happiness all that time! How we should cry out like Francis of Assisi for “our lady Death,” but could not die! NEW ANXIETIES. And yet in the end death would come. It is only postponing it, and its great riddle would remain unanswered. Perhaps all this new knowledge that is coming to us, these now powers which are being put into our hands, will not, after all, lead to new happiness, but to new anxiety. What guarantee of mental happiness have we in our mastery of mechanical things? Certainly without some spiritual vision, no longer denied by many of the scientists, man will never bo happy or satisfied with his earthly condition. It is‘, perhaps, better not to eat this fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. We may be getting to know too much, or think wo know everything, when we know very little. There are other ways in which the scientists are experimenting with the old law's of life, and suggesting strange ways in which the body may be made a better, or a different kind of machine. They are busy inquiring into the nature and chemistry of food. MAGIC VITAMINS. For some years now scientists in many countries, including the Lister Institute in London, which has done some very valuable work in this direction, have been searching for vital elements in animal and vegetable food and have succeeded in classifying them. There are vitamins A, B. C, D, which act as body builders, energy makers, or nerve restorers, essential, in proper proportions, to human life and health. I remember that after the war when under-nourishment, if not actual starvation, was a prevalent form of disease in countries like Austria and Germany, a woman friend of mine named Doctor Chick, from the Lister Institute, was engaged in research work in Vienna and helped to prove that certain vitamins had the effect of curing rickets. She also discovered that by irradiating a child’s hand with artificial sunlight the whole body could be cured of rickets in the same way as by vitamins in food. Those vitamins were found richly contained in cod-liver oil. But quite lately it has been found that a substance called chloresterol, which is a .solid alcohol with a wax-like appear-

ance, has the strange power of forming, when exposed to sunlight or ultraviolet rays, the most important of the vitamins—namely, vitamin D—which is found naturally in cod-liver oil. This chloresterol is light-sensitive—-like a photographic plate—and lightstoring. It is a constituent of almost all living tissue. FAR-REACHING RESULTS. Two Englishmen, Rozenheim and Webster, of the National Institute for Medical Research in London, now claim to have produced a substance based on chloresterol which contains even more of this light-storing quality, and they call it ergostorol. It can be prepared from the fat of certain plants, including yeast, and contains tho pure vitamin D. According to the reports I have seen, a rat needs about one-thousandth of a milligram of this stuff each day to keep it in health. Tho amount a human being would require from birth to death would be something under one ounce. It is possible that this discovery may lead to far-reaching results not only upon the health of human beings but upon their economic and social life. Why raise vast herds of cattle and enormous flocks of sheep, why employ millions of men in slaughter yards and all the processes of providing a meat diet for humanity, if synthetic food may _be obtained by chemical combination? A DROP AND A BISCUIT. If that ever happens there will be no restaurants in the future, no public banquets with seventeen courses to poison their guests, no butchers’ shops, no anxieties for the young married wife who has been advised *to /‘feed the brute,” and no elaborate cuisine in the scientific household of the future. There will be a few bottles of chemical food on the mantelshelf, from which the family and friends will help themselves—just a drop or two on a dry biscuit—when their rejuvenated bodies require nourishment. “ Synthetic food,” says Mr .1. B. SHaldane, “will substitute the flower garden and the factory for tho dunghill and the slaughter house and make the city at last self-sufficient.” He does not regret the possibility. FRIGHTFUL DANGERS But none of the things which the scientists foreshadow as the promise of the future will assure the happiness of man. Many of them may lead to frightful dangers—freaks and monstrosities from surgical laboratories, a machine-like system of life enslaving the workers, powers put into the hands of the human race for its own destruction. Unless the mentality and morality of men and women reach higher standards so that they can control this modern science and use it for good instead of evil, then the future may come with new miseries rather than with wonder-working gifts. Is the human mind itself capable of an evolution quick enough to adapt itself to all this new knowledge? Is the mind of man advancing to attain mastery of its own instruments? Everything depends on that, for otherwise wa ourselves may be mastered by the monstrous forces that have been unleashed in the secret places of science and our progress will be towards evil, and very swiftly. The world is waiting for a spiritual understanding of these material powers, and cannot afford to wait very long.