Part I.—(Otto Glasser) EXPERIMENTS on mitogenetic or Gurwitsch radiation have been conducted in the Department of Biophysics of the Cleveland Clinic Foundation for the past seven years. A study of the whole problem of this type of radiation and a discussion of some of our results were published recently (1,2). Our observations did not confirm those reported by Gurwitsch and his co-workers. Fortunately, Hans Barth, who has obtained positive results in direct collaboration with Gurwitsch, is now continuing his studies on the mitogenetic radiation in our laboratory and will present his observations in the second part of this paper. The chief problem concerning mitogenetic radiation primarily consists in discovering or devising reliable methods for detecting its presence. We have worked with both physical and biological detectors. Naturally, it is desirable to utilize physical methods and we, therefore, first employed a photographic method, then the photo-electric Geiger-Müller counter tube. We soon abandoned the photographic method as being unreliable. Our Geiger counter tube method has been described in a previous communication (1). In brief, it consists of a cylindrical tube connected through a multi-stage vacuum tube amplifier to a magnetic counter, a loud speaker, and a ticker tape recorder. The plate materials were selected for sensitivity to short ultra-violet radiation and have included Cd, Zn, Sn, Au, Ni, and Pt. The “senders,” which are supposed to emit mitogenetic radiation, were placed over the quartz window of the counter tube in quartz vessels. Control counts were made by interposing a glass window during alternate periods, all other conditions remaining the same. Since biological detectors have been employed by many investigators of mitogenetic radiation, we also conducted experiments with yeast as a biologic detector at the same time that we were employing the photo-electric counter tube. At first we used cultures of Saccharomyces cerevisiæ and S. ellipsoideus in Sabouraud, Williams', and beer-wort media. Day-old cultures of yeast in quartz and glass test tubes were exposed to various “senders.” After incubation overnight at 28° C., the volume of yeast was determined by centrifugation in mycetocrit tubes. Counts made with a hemacytometer supplemented the volume determination. Various cell concentrations were employed for exposure in an effort to determine the optimum stage of culture development. About two years ago, we revised our yeast method following the receipt of two strains of yeast from the laboratories of Gurwitsch, in Leningrad. Cultures of the yeast were prepared on beer-wort-agar or in liquid beer-wort in strict conformity with the procedures Gurwitsch outlined. Determinations on liquid cultures were made by centrifugation five or six hours after exposure. The agar beer-wort cultures were homogeneous at the time of exposure and could be detected only microscopically.
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Jul 1, 1983
Tatsuo Okano 