Barrett
Yes, of course. Very ingenious. Very ingenious. But how do you prove the origination of the cell in the fashion that you want?
Mitchell
(Aside.) A rather slow movie, I should say, considering the length of time it has taken to build it up.
Syphers
Well, in this way—it has its drawbacks, of course; you remember the experiments of that Irish scientist Burke, don’t you? He generated what he called a radiobe—a single cell in a plasm culture which he had hermetically sealed and which he kept under the influence of radium. I do not recall the exact facts of the case at the moment, and I do not believe that his deductions have since been accepted, but that is neither here nor there. That idea of his illustrates mine very well. If we could prove that one cell, one radiobe, had been or could be originated or generated by an outside influence of this kind—radium, if you wish, in a plasm of that kind—we would have to admit that the whole thing might be built up in some such fashion. Why, you could base a new philosophy on that, Mitchell. One radiobe generated in a plasm culture under radium or something else, some autogenetic force manifesting itself through a thing like radium, and there you are. After that you would have to grant the possibility of millions and billions of cells coming in that fashion, whole nations constructed of cells, as they have been.