Essays in scientific synthesis / by Eugenio Rignano.

  • Eugenio Rignano
Date:
[1918]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Essays in scientific synthesis / by Eugenio Rignano. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    81/264 page 77
    link ; and then the problem would be how to bring back these lateral groups of atoms in order to reconnect them with the central mass. Thus Verworn, in his “ biogen ” hypothesis, admits that in disassimilation the non-nitrogenized atomic groups alone are detached, while the nitrogenized remain and constitute the central group, which is reconstituted later on in its primitive labile complexity at the expense of new non-nitrogenized atomic groups, which are equal to those eliminated and which are provided by the nutritive liquid. Organic chemistry, on the other hand, teaches us that central groups of the same com¬ position may serve as a base for lateral groupings of the most varied types. If, then, central groups and lateral groupings of all types are found already prepared in the nutritive liquid, it is quite admissible that when the same shock of the same identical quantity of energetic capacity, already provoked by the detachment of this or that lateral atomic group of a well-defined quantity of mass, propagates itself anew’ within this nutritive liquid, it will shake the atomic groups of the same quan¬ tity of mass, and these atomic groups alone, by selecting them, so to speak, from all the rest, and thus provoking anew their reunion with the central group. The reversibility of this process would thus be partly comparable to that, but partly of a different nature from that, of certain catalytic processes in which the same enzyme favours both the hydrolysis and the synthesis of certain organic substances, i.e. both their decomposition and the inverse process of recomposition from the separated products of the decomposition. But we may now ask if these properties attributed
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