The Genius of Louis Pasteur

More documents

Recommendations

Info

The author (left) poses with a portrait of Pasteur painted for the conference by FEF member Karel Vereycken. spectroscopy, is based," Hamerman said. "Pasteur traced his own heritage to the method of scientific hypothesisformation associated with the constructive geometry program of the 1794 Ecole Polytechnique of Gaspard Monge and Lazare Carnot and its scientific continuation into the 19th century through the Societe D'Arcueil." The next presentation was given by Dr. David from the Merieux Institute, who described his work as the leader of a "Bioforce," a rapid deployment health strike force specifically designed to intervene in Third World countries. To avoid immediate biological catastrophe, the Bioforce intervenes in critical areas for rapid mass vaccinations, as in Peru now against rabies. Closing the first morning session, Maurice Vallery-Radot, who was educated by Pasteur's daughter, the historian Marie Louise, spoke on Pasteur as a politician. He insisted that Pasteur detested what today would be called liberalism—that is, anarchic democracy, the worship of mediocrity. Pasteur demanded that anything not susceptible of precise scientific knowledge be excluded from the political domain. The Concept of Negentropy The second panel opened with a speech by Dr. Jonathan Tennenbaum, European coordinator of the Fusion Energy Foundation, on Bernhard Rie- mann and the relevance of his groundbreaking work on geometry to studying living phenomena. Tennenbaum situated the continuation of Riemann's work in the 20th century by American economist Lyndon La- Rouche, who developed the concept of "negentropy" based upon his studies of the scientific work of Riemann and Georg Cantor. Next, Prof. Jean-Michel Dutuit, a paleontologist from the Paris Museum of Natural History, spoke on the theme of "the rise to power of the living process." Dutuit stated that if we are to believe the most current notions, biological evolution would be a strange story, consisting of choices made by successive ecologies over hundreds of millions of years—choices picked up amid innumerable solutions haphazardly "proposed" by living forms. Dutuit illustrated the problem with such a conception by reviewing the emergence of the very first germs of life, 3.5 to 4.0 billion years ago, the solar system and the Earth having appeared about 5 to 6 billion years ago. Life must be seen as a "process in work"—process, in the sense that life is no mere succession or juxtaposition of animal and vegetal forms, he said. Consequently, Dutuit explained, the object of our reflection is the mode of growth of life conceived as a whole, capturing and transforming universal energy. So conceived, life corre sponds to a change in metrics of universal evolution. Life is not juxtaposed, or opposed to the inanimate world, nor is it a parasite on that world, as other conceptions claim, but it represents the carrying out of the history of such an inanimate world, through other more efficient means and the use of different laws. Dutuit then proposed an attempt to quantify the essential phase-changes in the evolution of the vertebrates. The mode of regularly accelerated negentropic growth, which is that of life, the growing intertwining of the coming into being of the organic and inorganic worlds, and more clearly, the relations of an economic sort between these two worlds, he said, show that there exists between them two-way correlations, and that the programmatic transformations of life are not arbitrary. Life is not a blind process. Dutuit concluded that it would be criminal if, now that it has become conscious with Man, evolution were bent or reversed, whether the cause be war, economic shortages, or a cocktail of viruses and bacteria. Optical Biophysics Dr. Fritz Popp, from the Kaiserslautern University in West Germany, then spoke on the role of DNA in ultraweak photon emission of biological systems. Today, he said, it is an admitted fact that living systems emit a very weak photon radiation that is called "lowlevel luminescence." Popp and a group of researchers have worked out a model that explains "low-level luminescence" in terms of a nonequilibrium phasetransition, includingthe possibility of a surprisingly high coherence of this radiation. In 1980, researchers at the Max Planck Society in West Germany came out with the notion that the source of the weak photon emission from living tissues could only be chromophores. But Popp believed just the opposite. If the ultraweak photon emission is assigned to a coherent electromagnetic field, which is the most fundamental communication basis for living tissues, then the best candidate for its source would be the biomolecule with the highest potential information density—namely DNA. In conclusion, Popp said that: Continued on page 62 18 September-October 1986 FUSION Conference Report
Louis Pasteur After a photograph of M. Dornac, Pasteur Institute Museum Louis Pasteur in his study at the Pasteur Institute, 1890. Father of Today's Optical Biophysics Pasteur's geometric approach to biology—in the tradition of Cusa, Leonardo da Vinci, Kepler, and Leibniz—is the foundation of today's (and tomorrow's) frontier area of optical biophysics. by Warren J. Hamerman The discovery and elaboration by Louis Pasteur (1822- 1895) that optical activity is the unique geometric characteristic of living processes provides the foundation for the modern scientific frontier known as optical biophysics or nonlinear biological spectroscopy. Louis Pasteur's method of geometric biological spectroscopy—most explicitly evident in his groundbreaking early studies on molecular dissymmetry and fermentation— stands in refreshing contrast to the otherwise completely pragmatic and reductionist orientation pervasive in bio chemistry and molecular biology today. Pasteur traced his own heritage to the method of scientific hypothesis-formation associated with the constructive geometry program of the 1794 Ecole Poiytechnique of Gaspard Monge and Lazare Carnot and its scientific continuation into the 19th century through the Societe D'Arcueil. Pasteur established that living processes can be studied, analyzed, and "signatured" by their optical activity—which characteristic optical activity or "rotatory power of polarized light" is geometrically determined by a process involv- FUSION September-October 1986 19
Page 1 and 2: The Genius of Louis Pasteur His Dis
Page 3 and 4: FUSION SCIENCE • TECHNOLOGY • E
Page 5 and 6: Letters Put Fusion in Every School!
Page 7 and 8: strong, stable, homogenous magnetic
Page 9 and 10: SDI OPPONENTS PRESENT PETITION TO U
Page 11 and 12: just a containment structure around
Page 13 and 14: Fusion Report Fusion at the 'Breako
Page 15 and 16: H-mode has appeared only in tokamak
Page 17 and 18: university institute in a governmen
Page 19: Conference Report Warren Hamerman T
Page 23 and 24: ing classical geometric "projection
Page 25 and 26: action of the twisted staircase or
Page 27 and 28: light. The extent of rotational act
Page 29 and 30: could be as similar as Mitscherlich
Page 31 and 32: Figure 8 HUYGENS'S PRINCIPLE AND CI
Page 33 and 34: thetartrate/paratartrate problem th
Page 35 and 36: esponsbility to maintain leadership
Page 37 and 38: Illustration by Robert McCall, cour
Page 39 and 40: Illustration by Robert McCall. cour
Page 41 and 42: Chairman Talks About America in Spa
Page 43 and 44: and provides a fundamental insight
Page 45 and 46: Courtesy of George Washington Unive
Page 47 and 48: Beam Technology Report Teller Confi
Page 49 and 50: For directed energy weapons, beam b
Page 51 and 52: ing electrons. A free-electron lase
Page 53 and 54: Figure 1 THE NUCLEAR FISSION PROCES
Page 55 and 56: • the fuel rods of zirconium allo
Page 57 and 58: tion. This glow makes it harder to
Page 59 and 60: y liquid nitrogen to keep the liqui
Page 61 and 62: On Volcanoes, Sunspots, and the Jup
Page 63 and 64: Dr. Joseph M. Hendrie Continued fro
Page 65 and 66: Free Electron Laser Continued from
Page 67 and 68: Green Terrorists at War Continued B

The Genius of Louis Pasteur

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?