Nature 12 October 2000
Millennium Essay
Nature 407, 677 (2000) Macmillan Publishers Ltd.
 

A victim of truth

SUNETRA GUPTA

Sunetra Gupta is in the Department of Zoology, University of Oxford,
Oxford OX1 3PS, UK.

Vitalism was an attempt to reconcile rationality with a sense of wonder.
 

Convictions, said Nietzsche, are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies. Among the catalogue of convictions that the human race has challenged and
eventually relinquished is the fascinating notion that living organisms are distinct from nonliving entities by possessing a 'vital force'. The
philosophy of 'vitalism' has its roots in the original distinction between organic and inorganic compounds, dating from around 1600, which was based
on their reaction to heat. Although both types of substance changed form when heated, inorganic compounds could be recovered upon removing the heat
source, whereas the organic compounds appeared to undergo a mysterious and irrevocable alteration.

The implication that the latter were imbued with a vital force gave birth to an idea that eventually came to occupy a very tricky position between
materialism and idealism by endorsing the viewpoint that, although organic material might obey the same physical and chemical laws as inorganic
material, life could not be governed by these laws alone.

MARY EVANS
Vitalism's singular place in history rests on its attempt to reconcile two opposing needs =97 the need for analytical reasoning and the need to
celebrate the mystery of human experience. The life of the Swedish chemist Jons Jacob Berzelius (pictured on the right) traced the tensions between
these concerns in dramatic detail.

We are accustomed to thinking of the defining event in Berzelius's life as the letter from his student that declared: "I must tell you that I can
make urea without the use of kidneys, either man or dog." The year was 1828 and Friedrich Wohler, in setting out to synthesize ammonium cyanate, had
obtained a white crystalline material which proved identical to urea. It was the first organic compound to be synthesized from inorganic starting
materials, and the achievement knocked down one of the few remaining tenets of vitalism that although organic chemicals could be modified in the
laboratory, they could only be produced through the agency of a vital force present in living plants and animals.

Berzelius apparently tried to downplay Wohler's discovery by exiling urea to a hinterland between organic and inorganic compounds. An alternative
school of thought proposes that his lack of enthusiasm had more to do with the problems it posed for his own theory of inorganic compound formation.
At any rate, the event struck many, including Wohler himself, as being more remarkable in demonstrating how a salt (ammonium cyanate) could
reconstitute itself into an organic substance with the same empirical formula.

By deflecting the issue towards the structural implications, Berzelius was able to maintain a dignified silence on the question of vitalism, leaving
us with room to speculate about what the discovery might really have meant to him personally. During his long encounter with chemistry he vacillated
between stances that are clearly supportive of a mystical vitalist force and others that are more accommodating of an atheistic materialism, which
he generally abhorred. It appears that much of his energies as a chemist were engaged in the honest negotiation of a compromise between these two
poles.

Vitalism did not die with the synthesis of urea, but its boundaries were pushed back a little further. Vitalists now began to contend that it was
an organism's functioning rather than its constituent substances that lay outside the boundaries of human comprehension. Berzelius, in his final
analysis, acknowledged that the notion of a vital force as distinct from normal inorganic forces was invalid; instead, organisms were to be
distinguished by a mysterious arrangement of "circumstances" dictated by the (divine) purpose of producing life. By the early twentieth century,
the focus of vitalism had shifted to another set of circumstances namely, the development of an organism. Known as entelechy, the concept that a vital
force accounts not only for the maintenance of life but also for its development was used by the vitalist Hans Driesch to explain the
astonishing process of embryonic differentiation.

Are where are we today in this process of gradual erosion? We now have a 'working draft' of the human genome and still the engineers of such a feat
are anxious to emphasize "the imponderables of the human spirit". It seems that we are still =97 perhaps happily so =97 trapped in a state of poetic
ambivalence towards the question of whether life is greater than the sum of its parts. Like Berzelius, we remain inclined to believe that the analysis
of life does not detract from its ultimate mystery.

Nature14 December 2000
Correspondence
Nature 408, 767 (2000) Macmillan Publishers Ltd.

Acid test finally wiped out vitalism, and yet . . .
 

Sir Sunetra Gupta in her Millennium Essay "A victim of truth" (Nature 407, 677; 2000) astutely points out the dilemma in which the Swedish
chemist Jons Berzelius found himself when his student Friedrich W=F6hler declared in 1828 that he could make urea, a typical product of living
organisms, from inorganic sources.

Gupta describes Berzelius's antagonism to the atheistic materialism that abandonment of vitalism would bring.

There was, however, another factor. An important reason that vitalism did not immediately disappear after W=F6hler's discovery is given in J. R.
Partington's textbook A History of Chemistry (Macmillan, London, 1961).

Wohler synthesized urea from ammonium cyanate. The cyanate was obtained from cyanide, which in those days was made from ferrocyanide which in turn
was extracted from the wastes from tanning factories. Thus, to an adherent of vitalism, the urea had not been derived from purely inorganic sources
but had a vital component.

The death-knell of vitalism in chemistry was sounded in 1845 when Hermann Kolbe showed that acetic acid, a common end product in living organisms,
could be "composed by synthesis from its elements". This was the first use of the word 'synthesis' in a memoir on organic chemistry.

Sidney Toby
Department of Chemistry, Rutgers, the State University, Piscataway, New Jersey 08854, USA

Nature14 December 2000
Correspondence
Nature 408, 767 - 768 (2000)  Macmillan Publishers Ltd.

. . . we need a metaphor to explain life's mystery
 

Sir Sunetra Gupta, in her poetic and accurate Millennium Essay on vitalism, concludes that "we remain inclined to believe that the analysis
of life does not detract from its ultimate mystery". Vitalism as biological metaphor survived for so long, she says, because it provided a basis for
retaining our primary experience of life as a mystery at the same time that we decompose the mystery through scientific analysis.

Holding these two ideas together may be seen as a form of cognitive dissonance, a state of mind producing considerable discomfort and mental
disorder. Allegiance to our current metaphor  'life is a machine' has led to much progress in medicine and agriculture, for example, but also
caused great harm to human beings and the worldwide environment.

Many formal mathematical and other scientific arguments deny the machine model in biology, and it might be a good start to reveal these arguments
to our students more than we do now.

We could start, perhaps, with Niels Bohr's worry that "the minimum freedom we must allow the organism will be just large enough to permit it, so to
say, to hide its secrets from us"1, and end with Diethard Tautz's treatment of a biological equation equivalent to Heisenberg's uncertainty
relationship in physics suggesting that attempts to predict biological function from genetic information may require "experiment on an
evolutionary scale"2.

Our inclination to believe in life's ultimate mystery appears to have a declining vitalistic (or any other) force in the machine world of everyday
life. Gupta does a real service in reminding us how important metaphor is in science. Just perhaps, we could find something closer to our primary
experience of life than our current machine metaphor as we approach the analysis of living things.

A little bit of scientific philosophy and physical theory like this might, if not vitalize, then at least brighten up those deterministic lectures in Molecular Biology 101.

Richard Strohman
Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California at Berkeley, 229 Stanley Hall, Berkeley, California 94720-3206, USA
 

References
1. Bohr, N. Nature 131, 458 (1933).
2. Tautz, D. Trends Genet. 16, 475-477 (2000).

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