On the Nature of BacteriophageSource: The Scientific Monthly, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Feb., 1926), pp. 177+179Published by: American Association for the Advancement of ScienceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/7449 .

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THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE 177

ON THE NATURE OF BACTERIOPHAGE

AN article in the current issue of TIIE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY entitled Do Bac- teria have Disease?" assumes bacterio-

AGAR? PLATE

ON THE RIGHT IS A CONTROL TUBE 01' BROTH CLOUDED BY A DEINSE CULTURE OF BACTERIA. ON THE LEFT IS A SIMILAR TUBE 18 HOURS AFTER THE ADDITION OF ONIE PART IN 1,000,000 OF

BACTERIOPIIAGE.

TEST TUBES SURFACE OF AGAR PLATE COVERED WITH A DENSE GRO\ N'I OF BACTERIA. THE CLEAR CIRCULAR

AREAS ARE VOID OF B3ACTERIA DUE TO THE ACTION OF TIlE B3ACTERIOPHAGE.

plhage to be enidowed with life. This ac- count preseints d 'Herelle 's viewpoint and accepts the theor y that it is a minute or- ganism or an ultramicrobe. Do the facts warrant suchl an assumption? Not nec-

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THE PROGRESS OF SCIE?NCE 179

essarily: A large volume of experimental evidence, collected by various investi- gators, both here and abroad, suggests that the phenomena described by d'Her- elle can be explained without the as- sumption of the existence of a living ultramicrobe.

According to these findings, the active principle responsible for the dissociation of bacteria may very well be a chemical substance which is a product of bacterial metabolism. While much of the evidenee against d'Herelle's hypothesis is too in- volTed and technical to be presented

here, the following facts, if correct, have shown that the so-called bacteriophage possesses properties incompatible with life: (1) Bacteriophage does not respire; (2) it is not destroyed by repeated freez- ing and thawing; (3) it does not reduee methylene blue; (4) it is not destroyed by acetone or by 95 per cent. alcohol.

Whether the use of bacteriophage in the treatment of disease is destined to revolutionize medicine of the future, as claimed by d 'Herelle, it seems important to determine its intimate nature.

THE AWARD OF THE COPLEY MEDAL TO PROFESSOR EINSTEIN

THE Royal Society awarded the Cop- ley Medal to Professor Albert Einstein, of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, at its anniversary meeting on November 30. At the tinme of the award the following citation was made:

The name of Einstein is known to every one through the theory of rela- tivitY whieh he originated in 1905 and extended by a notable generalization in 1915. Einstein realized that the time and space with which we are so directly acquainted by experience can be no other than the fictitious local time and space of the moving system-the motion in this case being that of the earth; we have no means of determining, nor can physical science be concerned with, any absolute reekoning of space and time. After this Einstein was led to the identification of mass with energy-another result of far- reaching importance which allows us to know the exact amount of the store of energy so tantalizingly hidden within the atom.

There was a feeling that this theory of relativity for uniform motion must be a particular case of something more gen- eral; but observational knowledge seemed to oppose a decisive negative to any ex- tension. It was Einstein again who found

the way to the generalization by bring- ing gravitation into his scheme.

Einstein's general theory of relativity is remarkable alike for the brilliance of conception and the mastery of the mathe- matical implement required to, develop it. The new law of gravitation must be reckoned the first fundamental advance in the subject since the time of Newton. It involves an interaction between gravi- tation and light, which had indeed been sutspected by Newton and almost taken for granted by Laplace, though it dropped out of scientific speculation when the corpuscular theory of light gave way to the undulatory theory. The three erucial astronomical tests of Ein- stein's theory have all been verified- the motion of perihelion of AMercury, the deflection of light, and the red-shift of the spectral lines. The last-named proved the most difficult to test, but there is now general agreement that it is present in the solar spectrum. More recently Ein- stein's theory of gravitation has appealed to astronomers not merely as something which they are asked to test, but as a direct aid to the advancement of astro- nomical research. Invoked to decide the truth of a suspicion of transcendently high density in the "white dwarf " stars,

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