Science Matters

Creating "life" in the laboratory

Boyce Rensberger

(6/2024) On November 26, 1899 The Boston Herald published this headline: "Creation of Life. Startling Discovery of Prof. Loeb. Lower Animals Produced by Chemical Means."

The story that followed talked about experiments done at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

The headline was a bit overblown. The Chicago Tribune followed with a somewhat more accurate account: "Science Nears the Secret of Life." The sub-heading said "a Long Step Towards Realizing the Dream of Biologists, ‘to Create Life in a Test Tube.’"

So, what actually happened? Why is this episode, largely forgotten today, worth reading about? I believe it tells us a lot about how the attitudes of Americans have changed since then.

When this story broke in 1899, the general public welcomed it as another of the astonishing advances of an era that was still getting used to such inventions as automobiles and electric lights, movies and the phonograph, X-rays and aspirin. It didn’t seem so surprising that the wizards of science and engineering could create living animals.

In the following years, the scientist who did the experiments, Jacques Loeb, carried out more experiments that garnered wide publicity, often landing him on the covers of national magazines. In his day, Loeb, a German immigrant, was probably the most famous scientist in America. (His only rival for similar attention was Thomas Edison, an inventor and not a scientist.) One of the great literary figures of the period, Sinclair Lewis, modeled the hero of his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1925 novel, Arrowsmith, on Jacques Loeb. The book was even made into a movie.

Within one generation of the scientist’s death in 1924, biology would be revolutionized. Before Loeb, biologists were mostly describing the world’s natural history. After Loeb, biology became an experimental science on a par with chemistry and physics.

Loeb’s belief that living things could be taken apart and tinkered with laid the foundation of a science in which America would become a world leader. Following what Loeb called "the mechanistic conception of life," American biological science would attain a preeminence that it holds to this day.

And yet, for all the hoopla, Loeb came nowhere close to creating life.

In that summer of 1899 Loeb was working in a simple, wooden laboratory just yards from the sea, measuring out chemicals that he stirred into bowls of seawater. In the bowls were one-celled eggs from female sea urchins. Loeb imagined that he could find a recipe to substitute for sperm from a male sea urchin.

He hit on the right formula—a simple pinch of magnesium chloride. Each one-celled ovum began dividing, again and again, the ball of cells becoming a fully functioning organism, complete with a skeleton, nerves, and a digestive system. It could even swim. In the wild, this larval sea urchin would eventually settle down and metamorphose into the bottom-dwelling pincushion shape.

Loeb reported his achievement in the American Journal of Physiology. He called his feat artificial parthenogenesis (from the Greek for virgin birth). He did not shy from speculating that it might be possible to achieve the same result in mammals.

"The idea is now hovering before me," Loeb had written nine years earlier to his friend Ernst Mach, the great Austrian physicist (the speed of sound was named for him), "that man himself can act as a creator, even in living Nature, forming it eventually according to his will."

Loeb told Mach that he believed scientists could one day create life through "a technology of living substance." To Loeb the experiment addressed a deeper issue, the fundamental nature of life itself. He believed that life was not the product of a supernatural "vital force." He argued that atoms and molecules behaving naturally could explain all of life’s processes. Many of Loeb’s colleagues agreed and nominated him for the Nobel Prize. Others disagreed, believing that life was too complex to be explained by anything less than the workings of a divine creator or, at the very least, a mystical, supernatural phenomenon, a "vital force" that inhabited living things. Loeb became a Nobel finalist, but he did not get the prize.

If the egg contains the plan for development of the embryo, Loeb wrote, "we can imagine the Mendelian factors [as genes were then called] giving rise to specific substances which go into circulation and start or accelerate different chemical reactions in different parts of the embryo, and thereby call forth the finer details characteristic of the variety [species] and the individual." Over an ensuing half century of research, geneticists would confirm that Loeb's speculation was exactly right.

Today the frontiers of biology are almost entirely devoted to understanding the physical and chemical machinery that is life itself. The old concept of a supernatural vital force is dead in science, though, of course, versions of it survive in some religions.

Soon Loeb was being profiled in national magazines. In the popular McClure’s Magazine, for example, he was quoted in 1902 as saying: "I wanted to take life in my hands and play with it. I wanted to handle it in my laboratory as I would any other chemical reaction-to start it, stop it, vary it, study it under every condition, to direct it at my will!"

In the years that followed, Loeb produced a succession of remarkable discoveries, many of which were covered by newspapers and magazines, creating in Jacques Loeb America’s first celebrity scientist.

Wilhelm Ostwald (1909 Nobel Prize in chemistry) wrote: "There is practically no limit to what man can do in this direction. Of course, at first, he will be able to produce only a piece of protoplasm, something like the water hydra or the resemblance of the sea urchin that Professor Loeb has evolved, but it will be instilled with real life."

Of course, nothing like that has happened. Still the optimism generated by Loeb's work, though the man himself is largely forgotten, has developed into a huge scientific enterprise aimed predominantly at the conquest of disease and human suffering.

Boyce Rensberger retired to New Midway after more than 40 years as a science writer and editor, mostly for The New York Times and The Washington Post. Write him at boycerensberger@gmail.com.