INTRODUCTION
“So may he doubt whether in cheese and timber worms are generated; or if beetles and wasps in cows’ dung; or if butterflies, locusts, grasshoppers, shell-fish, snails, eels, and such like be procreated of putrefied matter, which is apt to receive the form of that creature to which it is by formative power disposed. To question this is to question reason, sense, and experience. If he doubts of this let him go to Egypt, and there he will find the fields swarming with mice, begot of the mud of Nylus to the great calamity of the inhabitants.” Alexander Ross
“It was only in the middle 19th century that the concluding dispute took place over Bastian’s assertion that abundant bacterial life appeared in sterilized infusions of hay and other material.”
“omne vivum ex vivo”
“Seeds, small worms and microscopic animacula can be dried up and left totally inert for long periods of time, so that it is impossible to distinguish them from dead organisms; then at the touch of moisture they will resume the recognizable process of life.”
OS INTERESSANTES TEMPOS PRÉ-ASTRONÁUTICA (HOMEM, O PÁSSARO SEM PENAS, SEM DÚVIDA): “Mount Everest, more than 6 miles above the sea, was perhaps conquered by G.L. Mallory and A.C. Irvine in 1924. They started from a camp pitched at a height of 26,800 ft. on June 6th and never returned. From this camp they were watched struggling onward, and then they were hidden by driving mists and never seen again. Dr. Somerville and Lieutenant-Colonel Norton, with infinite pain and suffering, had previously got to 28,200 ft. Sommerville suffered horribly from the parching of his throat in the intensely cold and dry air, and Norton, after his return to camp, was stricken with snow-blindness. It is probable, but not certain, that Coxwell and Glaisher exceeded these limits in a balloon in 1862, and attained something over 30,000 ft. They were conscious above 29,000 ft. After Glaisher became insensible, Coxwell, by a last effort, pulled the valve cord with his teeth, his hands being too frost-bitten to use. Until recently, the height record for any living thing was the balloon record of Berson and a companion, made in July, 1901. They certainly reached 24,500 ft. but then they became unconscious in spite of their inhalation of oxygen. In November 1927, this was exceeded by Captain Gray, of the US Army Aviation Service, who reached 42,470 ft. He lost his life through his oxygen running out as he descended. No other living creature, so far as our knowledge goes, has ever transcended these limits. The condor of the Andes is credited with 23,000 ft. by Humboldt.” “42,000 ft., a trifle over 8 miles, not 1/10 of what a fast automobile can do in an hour on the level, but so far it is practically the limit of the upward range of life. Even to win that much demands elaborate preparation and frightful exertion. § Three main wants restrict the living body to the lower levels – deficiency of oxygen to breathe, deficiency of pressure upon the exterior of the body, and intense cold. The Everest expeditions of 1922 and 1924 met the former need by taking up large supplies of compressed oxygen, and the same thing is done in the attempts of aviators to break the height record. Within limits the body of the mountain climber can be gradually educated to the diminished pressure, but the aviator runs great danger of suffering from an extreme form of mountain sickness.”
“There may be bleeding in ears, and lungs, and even from the eyes and gums. [gengivas]” “Major Hingston, the medical officer of the Mt. Everest expedition of 1924, says that ‘the very slightest exertion, such as the tying of a bootlace, the opening of a ration-box, or the getting into a sleeping-bag, was associated with marked respiratory distress’. At 27,000 ft. Dr. Somerville had to take 8 or 10 deep respirations for every step forward. Lieut.-Col. Norton at his highest ascended 80 feet in an hour of extreme exertion.”
“Tissandier, who made a balloon ascent to 27,950 ft. from Paris in 1875, fainted at 26,500 ft. and when he recovered consciousness the balloon was descending and both his companions were dead.” “Glaisher stared at his instruments, but could not read them. ‘There is no suffering’, wrote Tissandier, ‘only an inward joy’.”
“downwards it is increasing pressure and, in the solid earth, increasing temperature, against which life has to fight.” “At the St. Louis Bridge, under a pressure of 4½ atm., 100 workmen suffered seriously and 14 died out of a total of 600 men employed.”
“If a ship’s hawser [sirga ou amarra, cabo de reboque ou ancoragem – no caso, não seria um cabo, por chamarmos tudo que é de cânhamo ou madeira de corda apenas], says Professor J. Arthur Thomson – a hempen hawser, of course, is meant – is sunk to the depths of a couple of thousand fathoms [~3600m], it is squeezed to less than the diameter of one’s wrist, and a piece of wood that has gone down so far will no longer float. Whatever lives at great depths – if it contains air or gas – must have its internal pressure as great as those about it.”
“Sometimes some of the deep sea fishes fall upward. Many of them, like their surface kindred, have swimming bladders to accommodate themselves to varying levels. These bladders contain gas under enormous pressure. If one of the abyssal fishes rises too high in pursuit of its prey, the gas in its bladder may expand out of control of the muscles. The fish can no longer go down, but continues to rise helplessly, and as it rises to levels of less and less pressure, the expansive force of the gas within is less and less restrained, until at last the creature rushes up to the surface and arrives there distended or burst and dead.
The ocean at its deepest goes down perhaps for 7 miles. Life, therefore, so far as we know, is confined to a layer of air and a layer of water, having a total thickness of less than 14 miles, on this comparatively small planet Earth, and no one single form of life is able to span even these petty limits. Man’s vertical range seems to be as great as any creature’s and it is no more than 8 miles.”
“Aristotle we may take as standing in this matter on the dividing line between the unsystematic intelligent person and the systematic inquirer.”
“The systematic botanist kept a similar dump. He made a lovely classification of flowering plants, he never tired of arranging them and then hurled all the awkward cases together into a division of Cryptograms which had nothing in common except that they had no flowers to be dried and put neatly between sheets of blotting paper. It is among these queer, out-of-the-way, low-caste flowers and plants, as we shall see, that some of the most interesting and illuminating work of modern times has been done.”
“Man was a biologist perforce long before the dawn of history, classifying plants into edible and inedible, and accumulating a lore of the animals he hunted, and perhaps of the animals that hunted him. In the Old Stone Age, perhaps 20,000 years ago, he was already making very competent drawings of the beasts that concerned him.”
“Mythology hints at a disposition to attempt the most extraordinary hybridisations. Every conceivable combination of domesticated species was probably attempted by Neolithic man.”
“Hanno, the Carthaginian, after his memorable coasting voyage about Africa, hung the skins of his gorillas in a temple with an inscribed record.”
“We hear, for the first time, of dissection and of vivisection at Alexandria. (…) The question whether vivisection was actually performed upon human subjects in Alexandria is still an open one.”
“The use of a water-flask for magnifying objects may have been known, and probably was known, to the jewelers of ancient Egypt, but it never seems to have got through to the philosophers.”
“There are millions of people in the world who have never contemplated themselves unclothed in a mirror, and would not willingly do so.”
“From Laputa to the Pickwick Club, British literature, for example, spits and jeers at its greater sister, [a ciência – mais para irmã pequena] and to devote a life to science and the service of truth is still to renounce most of the common glories and satisfactions of life for a hard and exalted mistress.”
“In many of its branches the advance of biology has been determined by the progress of microscopy. A third great mine of contributory knowledge was opened up by the study of fossils, of which Nicholas Steno (1638-86) was the pioneer.”
EM 1800, EM 1900, EM 1910, EM 1920, EM 1930, EM 1990, EM 2020, EM QUALQUER DÉCADA: “In some of the more backward regions [eufemismo] of the US, moreover, there is a formidable campaign for the penalization of any biological teaching that may seem to run counter to the literal interpretation of the Bible.”
“the anti-vivisection campaign displays all the unscrupulous exaggerations natural to tender and imaginative minds tormented beyond any possibility of patient and sober judgment.”
“ecology – the observation of animals in their proper surroundings and of their normal interaction and ways of life, and what one may call field physiology”
“There are now even bacteriological zoos, so to speak, where collections of living cultures of this, that, and the other infection are available for the experimentalist.”
BOOK 1. THE LIVING BODY
1. THE BODY AS A MACHINE
O PAI DE FAMÍLIA AMERICANO: “For a time his attention is divided between swallowing to satisfy his interior need and reading the newspaper to employ a mind which might otherwise be bored while this primary business preoccupies him.” “At lunch again he may seek the distraction of a book or paper, [!] or talk with companions.” “He may find such a sedative drug as tobacco useful in slowing down the urgency of his bodily engines.”
Os heróis dostoievskianos não cagam.
“A man was shut in a calorimeter (heat-energy measurer) for 19 periods of 24h each: on the average he have out 2,682 large calories in each period, and ate an amount of food which would yield if burnt a 2,688 calories. (A large calorie is the amount of heat required to raise one litre of water from 0º to 1º centigrade.)” “We are, therefore, justified in concluding that man and the animals generally are fundamentally mechanisms, driven by the energy liberated in the oxidation of food. A mouse or a man works in much the same way as a petrol motor”
1. THE COMPLEX BODY-MACHINE AND HOW IT WORKS
“The writer of the text-book or the university lecturer is free from these perplexities. His readers and hearers are under compulsion to go on attending. He can say everything. (…) Yet our better-informed readers must allow us to run through, as compactly as possible, a certain amount of knowledge they no doubt acquired at school.”
“occasionally we meet gifted individuals who have extra head muscles – thin films over the domed top of the skull by means of which they can waggle their scalp, delicate strips that allow them to twitch their ears.”
“A frog has no neck; if a frog wants to snap at an insect he has to turn his whole body until his mouth is pointing in the right direction.”
“Most of us have wondered at times why Nature never foresaw the kick and the stab at our lower vital centres. The liver and stomach indeed cower up under protection of the lower ribs, being able to do so because of the domed frame of the midriff, but the poor bowels are dreadfully exposed in a beast that walks erect. The rest of the contents of the abdomen need but the slash of a sharp knife to be spilled abroad, as happens in hara-kiri, that form of suicide so popular in Japan.”
“In a fish the tail is even more important [than in the mouse]; it is the principal organ of locomotion, and includes all the bones, muscles, blood-vessels and nerves that are necessary for movement in a limb.” “In ourselves the tail is represented by a useless little curling end of the vertebral column that does not even project from the surface of the body.” Although we are conceived as tails!
“The word ‘cell’ is a most unfortunate word in this connexion. That is why the triplex writer has put fastidious inverted commas about it in the last 2 sentences. He dislikes handling and using it. He has to do so, but thus he shows his reluctance. The old original meaning, the proper meaning of ‘cell’, was a compartment, an enclosure. We still talk of the hermit’s cell or a cell in a prison. [Not us!] And many people at the outset of their biological reading are misled, therefore, into imagining that our living tissues have a sort of honeycomb structure. Nothing could be farther from the reality. The proper word should be ‘corpuscle’ (little body) and not cell at all.” “the misnomer arose very easily and naturally. Hooke, in 1667, peered down a microscope at a thin slice of dead cork [cortiça], and found it to consist of an enormous number of tiny empty boxes fitted closely together, and cells seemed to be the only proper word for them.” “Very gradually the interest of investigators shifted from the boxes to the contents, but not abruptly enough to rechristen these objects. (…) It is the protoplasm and not its garment [o envoltório] which makes the cell. In animal tissues (…) The protoplasm may go bare”
“The threads are called mitochondria, and are composed of albumen and a fat-like compound, lecithin. Though evidently of importance to the cell, their use has not yet been discovered.” [!]
“In 2 or 3 days the multiplying and growing cells will have poisoned the serum with their own excretions and the ‘culture’ will die; but this death can be prevented by putting a little of the failing culture into a drop of fresh serum, when the reproduction of the cells will resume and go on until that drop also is fouled.” “By sub-culturing every few days it is possible to keep strains of detached cells alive for months, even years” “Cell-strains taken from a chick embryo have lived over 14 years, while the ordinary life of a fowl is not a third of that span.”
“they cease to be typical muscle-cells, nerve-cells, or kidney-cells, and become more like the primitive connective-tissue cell that we have described above. They cease to be parts, they become wholes.”
“A minute trace of calcium must, for example, be present if our muscle-cells are to obey our will. Withdraw that and they will begin a rhythmic twitching.”
“The nitrogen has a free ride round the system, but apparently has no function whatever.” Pré-história do código genético e do estudo das proteínas!
“Velocities always look deceptively high through the microscope, because the instrument magnifies distance without magnifying time.”
“We cannot watch the blood as it travels, ever more swiftly, towards the heart; the frog is too opaque for our microscope to penetrate. The rest of the story has been pieced together by dissection and by experiment.”
“Cells are able to accumulate little stores of sugar, fat, or a very important nitrogenous material, protein, in their own bodies, to be used when required” Ué, então por que ignoravam a função do nitrogênio no sangue?!
SUBSÍDIO CONTEMPORÂNEO: “I guess in school they didn’t tell you about the nitrogen at all, for the matter of simplification, because it is of no function in the body and the O² and CO² are the important gasses for biological function of breathing. § However, all of these small gas molecules are very small and generally the biological membrane is very permeable to them. That’s why the cell cannot decide to let O² and CO² in and N² not as you suggest.” https://biology.stackexchange.com/ – Mesmo assim, varrendo o google, acho que não avançamos tanto nessa questão do nitrogênio na “era nanotecnológica”! Será que todos os pesquisadores estão ficando gradualmente mais burros conforme se especializam e contam com as conquistas das gerações anteriores sem conseguir processá-las adequadamente durante suas carreiras?
“There is a silence, then a long sound, then a short, sharp sound, then silence, then a long sound, then a short, sharp sound, then silence again – Lubb . . . dup, Lubb . . . dup, Lubb . . . dup. The filling of the heart from the veins and the contraction of the auricles to fill the ventricles are noiseless; the sudden, violent rush of blood when, in turn, the ventricles contract gives the long sound, Lubb . . . The short sound depends on a property of the arteries. The arteries have elastic walls. When blood is forced into them under considerable pressure by the ventricles they give, and when the ventricular contraction ceases they recoil. If it were not for the valves at their openings, the result of this recoil would be to drive blood back into the heart, but actually it closes the valves. The aorta, the main arterial trunk which supplies all the body except the lungs, is abruptly cut off from the ventricle and the slam of its valves causes that 2nd heart sound . . . dup.”
“Moreover, the fact that the blood, instead of flowing along in one broad current, has been divided into a multitude of tiny parallel trickles, ensures that the surface of contact between blood and flesh is as great as possible.” “all the capillary vessels in a man’s muscles put end to end to form a continuous tube would girdle the Earth 2 and ½ times.” [!]
“Lymph, [the mediator between flesh and blood] in the intercellular spaces, is simply a fluid through which substances diffuse. It comes from the blood and it is destined to return to the blood.” Os vasos linfáticos renovam essa substância: “They are indeed shadowy plasma veins.”
“The flow of lymph in the lymphatics is slower even than that of blood in the veins, and, as in the veins, it is assisted by valves, by bodily movements, and probably by rhythmical contraction of the vessels themselves. The course of the lymphatic vessels is not so direct as that of the veins. They unite and separate again to form networks and their course is interrupted by passages through curious spongy labyrinthine filters, the ‘lymph-glands’, but ultimately the lymph is led to a great main lymphatic in the chest, the thoracic duct, and this trunk runs up the back of the chest and opens into one of the great veins near the heart. Thus the lymph is returned again to the blood-stream from which it originated.” O próprio linfa são “gotículas” do sangue que atravessam as paredes das terminações mais finas das artérias (as capilares/capilárias) e “hidratam” esse “meio-campo quase vazio” entre carne e sangue (vasos) em si.
“Lights is the old word for lungs; in the bills of mortality of the 18th century, pulmonary consumption figures as ‘rising of the lights’.”
…leitura abandonada…
