Ross Aiken Gortner and Bound Water, the Water of Life

ROSS AIKEN GORTNER AND BOUND WATER, THE WATER OF LIFE FRANK D. MANN* No doubt one could trace to antiquity the idea that the water which composes most of the living body is in some way extraordinary. But the first scientist to place this concept within the framework of physical chemistry was, for a now aging group of biochemists, their teacher, Ross Aiken Gortner. Perhaps the story should be told before it is entirely forgotten and credit for this great (if it be true) idea goes entirely to others. Gortner spent his scientific life as professor of agricultural biochemistry at the University of Minnesota. One of his earlier students was R. Newton, later president of the University of British Columbia. Newton's thesis was a study of the physicochemical parameters of sap expressed from winter wheat. One fall day in about 1920, an early hard freeze struck the experimental wheat planting. Newton came to Gortner with the excited comment, "I can't get any juice out of Minnesota-Hardy" (a new strain of winter wheat). This observation led Gortner to the hypothesis that wheat became winter hardy by rendering its water unable to freeze; it was "bound water." Then followed many researches in which the water not only of winter-hardy plants but of gelatin gels and many preparations of biocolloids was studied by virtually every physicochemical method then available [I]. These included cryoscopy, dilatometry, polarimetry, and determinations ofspecific heat and dialectric constant and osmotic pressure. With all of these methods, it appeared that an appreciable fraction ofthe water in the materials studied was not free. Similar results soon appeared from other laboratories. However, the vapor-pressure method of A. V. Hill indicated virtually all of the water to be free. Gortner pointed out that this method might be expected to give minimal values for bound water of a gel, since what was actually determined was the vapor pressure of water of syneresis, a dilute sol on the surface of every gel. Such, however, was the prestige of Professor Hill that this negative finding was interpreted by the scientific world as a total denial of the bound-water * Address: 5316 East Road Runner Rd., Scottsdale, Arizona 85253. 142 I Frank D. Mann · Ross Aiken Gortner and Bound Water hypothesis, and it received little further attention, except from Gortner's own students. Needless to say, the methods of physical chemistry have been greatly improved and expanded since Gortner's time. A number ofinvestigators have reached conclusions essentially similar to his, without expressing any continuity with his earlier work. In a monograph entitled "Forms of Water in Biologic Systems," published by the New York Academy of Sciences in 1965 [2], Gortner's work received only one passing mention in over 500 pages. This oblivion of Gortner's work is unfortunate for reasons beyond the mere failure to recognize a pioneer investigator. The theory of bound water went far beyond winter wheat. Gortner was well aware that most of the water in animal cells is not so firmly bound as to be entirely unable to act as a solvent or to freeze. He thought in terms of a broad spectrum of degrees of orientation of water molecules around the molecules of protein and other biocolloids, with changes in hydration playing a role in many life processes. Especially, he sought an explanation of aging in terms of loss of hydration capacity. Gortner regarded as especially pertinent to his theory the observation that periodic severe underfeeding can increase longevity under certain experimental conditions. This he considered due to the cells being forced to synthesize new protein with nascent hydration capacity. This was before the usually quoted work on longevity in rodents; Gortner based his reasoning on work done on planaria byJ. Wodsedalek at the University of Minnesota. (I have been unable to locate this work, which possibly may not have been published.) However, no mechanism was ever worked out whereby the hydration capacity of newly synthesized protein would change with time, and so the application of the bound-water theory to aging was left in the form of fluid discussion between Gortner and his students. According to the theory of H. S. Frank [3], water...