The Rhythmic Universe

THE RHYTHMIC UNIVERSE UNLESS a modern biologist, who tends to be concerned exclusively with the ultra-fine structure of genes and the feed-back mechanisms of hormones, has a broader outlook fostered by an acquaintance with the humanities and a sturdy philosophy, the world becomes a strange unreal universe , apparently far removed from the world he once knew. This broader view of the universe can have many rewarding moments, such as those experienced by this writer while visiting the laboratories of Dr. Frank A. Brown, Jr., at the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, Massachusetts, in the summer of 1959. Immediately one felt the impact of a research that was as close to the sea as the laboratory itself. Other laboratories at the famed MBL had electron miscroscopes, television microscopes, radiation scalers, and unique and sophisticated apparatus of various sorts; but here in the Brown laboratory one found much simple, home-made equipment, with intact animals going through their paces before a group of trained observers. Huge water baths regulated the temperature of glass respirometers which housed crabs with their whole oxygen supply contained in plastic bags. Their every breath was registered by automatic recording devices. In another room, snails glided over a marked course, all unaware that their meanderings were being suggested by the motion of magnets manipulated by researchers underneath their experimental platform. Fiddler crabs in a photographic darkroom regularly changed the color of their skin just as though they were still at home on their native beaches, becoming white at night and dark in the daytime , seeming to possess some sort of magic insight into an outer world from which they were completely isolated. Clams opened and closed their shells according to a set rhythm and made recordings of their activities on special devices, while 502 THE RHYTHMIC UNIVERSE 508 crabs ran to and fro or were quiet during regular intervals of time. This was the picture one got while visiting the laboratory of one of the outstanding biologists of our time. When one questioned the biologists who were performing these experiments as to the type of data they were receiving, their answers brought many new and interesting facts to light. The large repository of accumulated and processed data which they possessed and a number of charts they had prepared, based on their observations of the behavior and metabolism of the plants and animals studied, had led the investigators to the conclusion that all these observed activities, despite every effort at isolation from the outside, were moving in rhythm with the motions of the cosmos. Although the organisms were being studied under conditions of temperature, light and other environmental factors artificially maintained at an unvarying constancy, the plants and animals participating remained somehow in perfect accord with major cosmic or geophysical conditions of the outside world. A confirmation of this apparently indestructible harmony with the outer world, and even with outer space, arose from one summer's observation when the workers were at loss to account for the very eccentric results obtained from a certain set of experiments. When the meteorologic data corresponding to that particular period were consulted, it was discovered that the erratic behavior coincided exactly with a sudden and large outburst of sunspots! This correlation strengthened their suspicion that their organisms were somehow getting some type of "information" from the outside which was not being observed in the laboratory. Dr. Brown and his associates have published extensively the results of their work, and it is very interesting to note the evolution of the hypotheses involved as the work progressed for a number of years. In particular one is struck by the great similarity between the conclusions and explanations arrived at by Dr. Brown from controlled observations, and the Aristotelian doctrine concerning the influence of the " heavenly 504 SISTER MARGARET ANN bodies." The most recent and perhaps the most comprehensive review of this work was published by Dr. Brown in a recent issue of Science.1 Living organisms, Dr. Brown points out, inhabit a world of rhythms.2 The whole physical world, from that of the orbiting electrons in the atom to that of our planetary system revolving about the sun, shows regular cycles, or periodic...