The chemical synthesis of vital products and the interrelations between organic compounds : Vol. 1 / by Raphael Meldola.

  • Meldola Raphael, 1849-1915.
Date:
1904
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The chemical synthesis of vital products and the interrelations between organic compounds : Vol. 1 / by Raphael Meldola. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    required an animal'or a plant foirits production. If this* i$ lost.siglit of amidst the overwhelming mass of material accumulated‘hy the great army of workers in the field of Carbon Chemistxy—if we have produced thousands of compounds which do not and probably never will be found to exist in living organisms ; if we have gone so far. beyond Nature as to make it appear unimportant whether’an organic compound is producible by vital chemistry or not, we are running the risk of blockading whole regions-of undiscovered modes of chemical action by falling into the belief that known laboratory methods are the equivalents of unknown vital methods. The whole contents of this work will show how little warrant there is for assuming such an attitude as the above. Bather than interpose such a barrier to future investigation it would be better to return to the initial position and to ask critically how far chemical synthesis has as yet thrown light on the physiological processes of animals and plants. It is evident that no synthetical process of a pyrogenic character is of any particular biochemical interest. The fundamental synthesis par excellence—the photosynthesis which plants are enabled to accomplish, and in the course of which carbon dioxide is absorbed by an organic compound and the product or products decomposed with the liberation of oxygen—is as yet without a laboratory parallel. It has also long been recognised that many hydrolytic decompositions in the living organism which result in the formation of definite products are due to enzyme action. Such actipns can generally be imitated by laboratory methods, but the analogy between the natural and the laboratory process disappears when it is considered that as yet no organic nitrogenous hydrolysing agent of the nature of an enzyme has ever been synthesised. Still more recently has it been shown to be probable that certain up-grade syntheses in the living organism, i. e. the coalescence of simpler to more complex molecules, may also be the result of enzyme action Here again it may be said that the process might be imitated by the use of chemical reagents, but the actual vital method has not been reproduced in the laboratory. In emphasising these differences between laboratory synthesis and synthesis in the living organism it has appeared to me that some further stimulus might be given to bio- chemical investigation, and this consideration has had much weight in Croft Hill, Trans. Ch. Soc., 1898, 73, 634; Ber. Deutsch. ch. Qesell. 1901, 34, 1380 ; Kastle and Loevenhart, Am. Ch. Journ. 1901, 26, 533 ; Hanriot, Comp. Bond. 1901, 132, 313; Emmerling, Ber. Deutsch. ch. Gesell. 1901, 34, 3810; Fischer and E. F. Arm- strong, Sitzungsber. Pr. Akad. Berlin, 1901, 133 ; Ber. Deutsch. ch. Gesell. 1903, 25, 3144-