WILL REMAIN A SECRET

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 459, 14 September 1928, Page 9

WILL REMAIN A SECRET

MYSTERY OF LIFE A SURPRISED SCIENTIST (United P.A.—By Telegraph — Copyright) (United Service) LONDON, Thursday. While the scientists at the final meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and a wider public still, were discussing Dr. F. G. Donnan’s utterance in which he described Dr. A. V. Hill as being on the eve of a discovery of astounding importance, Dr. Hill was found at a holiday retreat laughing ineredulously at Dr. Donnan’s sensational announcement. He said:

“Dr. Donnan is an old friend of mine. Some time ago I lent him a paper containing the result of certain of my researches. He has read into what I wrote far more than I at any rate would read into it.” Dr. Hill frankly told his interviewer that he had not attempted to discover the secret of life itself and had no hope of ever discovering it. Life would always remain a secret. “It has been stated that I can make a living cell in my laboratory,” he said. “That is utter nonsense.

“My endeavour has been to find how the organisation of molecules in living cells work. Perhaps I have cleared Tip certain matters concerning living cells that formerly were mysteries, but the actual spark of life is beyond our discovery.”

At the association’s meeting Dr. Cathcart, who is a friend of Dr. Hill, described the extraordinary delicate machines the latter uses in his researches. One is small enough to go into a wrist watch. It measures the variation to 1,000,000 th part of a degree in the temperature nerve of a frog. In order to protect his delicate machinery from outside interference Dr. Hill had a three-ton concrete slab sunk in the floor of his cellar. Yet only on Sundays are the machines sufficiently free from the influence of outside vibrations to allow of him conducting measurements.