THE SECRET OF OUR ORIGINSChapter I

P19The Snake and Hypothesis

At the point of origin of Quinton’s research to establish his Marine Theory, there are to be found several hypotheses. Quinton has been criticized for this, though in this respect he is by no means an exception. Imagination, the forge of hypothesis, took on an entirely new intellectual importance and Quinton along with many others, could not fail to escape the narrow-mindedness of rationalistic and blinkered thinking.

When Claude Bernard and Henri Poincaré, along with Pasteur, declared that “at the beginning of experimental research, the imagination should give wings to thought”, they were in fact saying that the scientist above all is a creator: like the composer, the painter, the poet and the novelist, the scientist shows that sensitivity is the mainspring of imaginative ability. The constructive imagination required to create a hypothesis, and reveal new lines of thought cannot fail to stun or even outrage people of limited vision.

There will always be minds that insist that imagination should be removed from pure science. They remain content as gatherers of data. The peculiar thing is that it is exactly these people who lean on Claude Bernard’s experimental science to prop up their theories, when he was in fact the first to have warned them of the dangers of their way of thinking. Claude Bernard not only agreed with hypothesis, but based hypothesis on feeling. Experimental method relies on feeling, reason and experiment, as Bernard writes in his “Introduction à la Médicine Experimentale”. Feeling or intuition is the basis for the creation of an idea or hypothesis. Intuition is the point of departure for all rational experiment: without intuition, there can be no research, no learning, only sterile observation of facts. Claude Bernard’s argument is as follows:

“When the mind observes a fact, it registers the relationship between a phenomenon and its cause. This preconceived notion must then be correlated to the observed facts, in a word, checked out with nature... When an idea comes to life, it is spontaneous and unique... We are talking about a special awareness of the nature of original thinking, inventiveness and genius... All of

a sudden, there is a flash of light... A new idea materializes at this same speed of light, like a sudden revelation. An unexpected link is then perceived between all things by the mind.”

p20It was Henri Poincaré who attributed value and dimension to the overall validity of hypothesis: “Without hypothesis, the mathematician cannot survive: hypothesis, when examined and then confirmed through experiment, is transmuted to fertile truth” (La Science et l’Hypothèse).”

When Bernard and Poincaré declared, along with Pasteur, that “at the beginning of experimental research, the imagination must give wings to thought”, they were saying that the scientist is above all a creator: like the composer, the painter, the poet and the novelist, the scientist shows that the mainspring of imaginative ability is intuition. However, to pursue knowledge, we must scrupulously apply experimental tools so as to transform intuition into a rigorously objective instrument.

While the functions of reason in the human being show identical mechanisms between one individual and another, intuition is a strictly unique phenomenon. As Goethe put it, the genius of a thinker is rooted in personality, so it follows that the function of hypothesis will prove to be more or less significant, or visibly innovative, depending on the nature of the personality. Only at this point can research scientists turn to experiment, the basis of science, and confront genius with reality.

But a new idea, appearing “at the speed of light, as a sudden revelation”, is not just a gift of originality; a new idea needs above all to be nurtured. When Newton, in 1666, conceived his Law of Gravitation, he had long been familiar with Descartes’ geometry and Wallis’ arithmetic of infinites. What is more, his own work had been already officially recognized. The fall of an apple could never have given weight to his intuitive understanding, if his mind had not already thoroughly explored the circumstances that had brought it to being. The mere observation of a fact is not in itself a great revelation bursting forth from human genius; it is the catalyst that sets into motion and unites within a coherent structure, all the elements that have up to now been scattered about at random.

In the fall of 1895, while staying at his family’s home in Bourgogne, René Quinton noticed how an adder, in a somnolent state owing to the cold, swiftly

recovered its energy in the warm air of indoors. The snake’s sudden recovery from hibernation because of the heat struck the young scientist in all its significance, preparing the ground for a series of astonishing hypotheses: nature could never have meant living beings to spend their time sleeping!

P21Quinton was 29 years old. He was born at a time when an able mind could still receive an extensive education, culturally speaking. René knew all the things that any educated person of his time would have known, but with this crucial difference: he had an unlimited curiosity that showed evidence of his genius. He would have been the first to say that he could never take for granted any fact whatsoever, if it was relevant at all to humanity. His father, a doctor in Chaumes en Brie, encouraged him to study science before going on to the humanities. At the age of 15, René had graduated as a Bachelor of Science, and gone on to study Philosophy and Rhetoric. His father suggested he study at the Polytechnics School, but the young man, pointing to the main square of Chaumes, reacted by saying: “One day, my statue will stand just over there”. His intellectual energy could never have permitted him to be content to plod in the footsteps of those before him.

René Quinton reached manhood at the height of Realism, when writers regarded literature as a branch of the natural sciences. Thanks to Bernard, experimental science was at its heyday, and novelists wrote what they considered to be experimental literature. Poets dreamed of a renewal of their art through science. And the “Grand Master” of this generation of writers was none other than Gustave Flaubert.

Fig. p21: The Unveiling Ceremony of Quinton’s statue 1931

P22Quinton knew by heart pages of Madame Bovary, Bouvard et Pécuchet, and Tentation. Flaubert’s direct style and sobriety of expression appealed to René’s clear and incisive mind. What most enchanted him was Flaubert’s concern in putting impersonal objectivity in priority over subject matter, with the emphasis always placed on careful documentation, to such a degree, that Flaubert actually read and annotated 36 books on horseback riding, just to write 3 pages of a hunting scene in La Légende de St Julien l’Hospitalier.

For some time Quinton devoted all his time to creative writing, including theatrical scripts and novels, begun but rarely completed, since his model was Flaubert, whose ideal was to achieve perfection. Quinton never published his novels or put on his plays. He knew they were not as good as what he expected of himself. And so it was that one day he discovered his true vocation.

In October of 1896, a year after the incident of the snake, Quinton left a sealed document at the Institut. This was a summary of his general ideas on the origins of Man, under the title of Les Deux Pôles Foyers d’origine. L’origine austral de l’Homme ( The Two Poles or Thresholds of Origin. The Austral Origins of Man). A few days before, he had sent a letter to the philosopher Jules de Gaultier, who was to become one of his most ardent admirers, in which he traced the outline of his work and made this comment: ‘ What a heavy load to take on! Here we are, among the snakes.’

So from an insignificant point of departure, thanks to his imagination and breadth of vision, Quinton reconstructed a huge saga of the creation of life up to the emergence of humanity. He next had to match up his theory to the real facts, a challenging but satisfying task. I now mean to take up the thread of his reasoning from the observation of our snake which had become, like Newton’s apple, a symbol of new discovery.

Quinton had recognized that the snake is a cold-blooded creature whose temperature is the same as that of the external environment. Like all reptiles, the snake must hibernate through winter, because the temperature is too low to permit much cell function. The question now is whether reptiles may have originated in an era when the overall temperature of the globe was higher than it is now. The answer given by geology and paleontology is that reptiles made their appearance in the Paleozoic Era, when there were no seasons and when the temperature, as a result, was more constant.

P23With this flash of insight Quinton had perceived the order of appearance of the history of life. If planet Earth was once a globe in fusion which had begun cooling at the poles, and where life could only exist at temperatures from 44C down, then we can deduce that life must have had its origin at the poles, during the long process of cooling of what up to now had been as hot as molten metal. This was the era of the reptiles, the great dinosaurs whose internal temperature was in total equilibrium with the external environment, at

44C, and whose descendants’ enormous vitality can yet be seen today in tropical regions.

But the globe went on cooling in its inexorable way and the polar Eden became a glacier-bound zone, while the areas with the temperature that caused life to flourish receded slowly toward the equator. In the wake of this cooling process, some organisms migrated, while others remained trapped in the zone of their origin.

Try to imagine a narrow band around the globe, where the temperature is 44C, which over the millennia has been moving slowly but inexorably from the poles toward the equator. During this process life has reached the temperature favorable to support it. Quinton maintains that “life expands over the globe as this band moves toward the meridian.” After reaching this narrow ideal thermal zone, the temperature goes on dropping slowly. The vitality of living things begins to decrease because their internal temperature goes through the same process as that of the external environment. Animal cells do not adapt well to such a fall in temperature. Among reptiles in the temperate zone, loss of vitality will become such that they will achieve a state of lethargy, will hibernate and will not resume their normal activities until summer has come round again.

Are living things really so enslaved to the temperature of the environment and the change of the seasons? Not really, because some species, when faced with dropping temperatures, become hyperactive and in this way maintain their body temperature.

P24 Quinton’s aim is to show that this does not happen by chance or natural selection, but through a positive refusal to accept the lower temperatures dictated by the environment. Life wants cell activity to remain at optimal levels, and for this to happen, life wants to keep its original temperature. As a result living things have learnt to create heat and maintain their tissues warmer than the external environment. To achieve this, life creates new organisms from old ones, abandoning obsolete forms with slower cell activity in favor of better models. When some reptiles try to raise their body temperature, they stop being reptiles and become birds. But they can only generate heat if all their organic systems have gone through a process of evolution, so as to modify the reptilian design.

At this point, I would like to draw attention to the following: I know through experience that this side of Quinton’s work is not especially appealing, unlike his fascinating experiments in the marine environment. It took many years and a happy chance that came my way, before I understood the further implications of Quinton’s work as a young scientist. And this was the question of how the study of animal temperature led him to the study of ocean waters.

This is where Quinton’s reasoning reveals his remarkable acuity. It is a known fact that warm-blooded animals, - mammals and birds – only made their appearance on our planet after the reptiles, within an increasingly colder environment. Quinton’s hypothesis, then, is that the ability of these animals to generate heat came into existence as the planet became gradually cooler, with the sole purpose of keeping cell activity going at optimal levels, regardless of the temperature of the external environment. Furthermore, this cell activity depends on the consumption of oxygen, that is, on combustion.

While the reptiles succumb to the gradually cooling temperatures, nature, in response to apparently mysterious instructions, creates new beings that abandon to an increasing extent their original reptilian form, so as to be able to maintain their original temperature, the only one that can ensure optimal cell function.

It is now that the research scientist must lay aside this general concept for the moment, and examine more closely the mechanisms that could justify it. We are still at the level of hypothesis and to reach a more exact understanding, this hypothesis has to be matched up to events on the planet.

P25First of all there is a drop in temperature from 44C to 43C. Invertebrates, and the older forms of vertebrate, the amphibians and the reptiles, now function at a temperature lower by one degree, which sets into motion their gradual decadence in terms of vital cell activity. But new organisms appear: these are the mammals that by using internal combustion are able to raise the temperature of their tissues one degree over that of the environment, that is, back to 44C. And a new species emerges to replace the previous species.

Then the globe cools one degree more. The amphibians and reptiles now function at 42C. The newly formed species reacts by raising its internal temperature by one degree, in order to maintain a steady 43C. But now a new

organism develops in turn from the previous one. This species is now able to raise its internal temperature to two degrees above that of the environment, so as to maintain the original ideal temperature of 44C.

Once again, the globe cools to 41C. Amphibians and reptiles succumb to diminished cell activity, the latest emergent species remain at 42C and 43C respectively, while yet another species develops from these, one that is able to raise its internal temperature to three degrees above that of the environment.

And so the process continues. Life does not accept the continued cooling of the environment, since this would harm cell function. And to keep the system going at full steam, new organisms develop greater efficiency in generating the heat necessary to maintain the ideal 44C.

The main point Quinton is making is that it is always the most recently evolved species whose body temperature most closely approaches the original 44C, while the others show their earlier emergence on the planet according to their specific body temperature. The lower their temperature, the longer they have been on the planet. At any stage of the cooling process, the vertebrate family tree is made up of a series of species, the most recent of which continue with a temperature of 44C, while the others show their respective ‘seniority’ on the planet, according to their diminishing temperature, from 43C down as far as 25C or more.

An affirmation such as this one, coming as it did from an absolute newcomer to established science, who up until a year before had been totally absorbed in his literary studies, must obviously have caused a veritable tidal wave of indignation and protest at every level of the scientific world.

P26Quinton’s hypothesis argues that life is in perpetual rebellion against decadence. He suggests that there is a definite will and purpose to the evolution of living things: life is not a random occurrence bound in a passive way to the whims of evolution.

Quinton was criticized for establishing a relationship between the gradual cooling of the planet and a corresponding scale of animal body temperature. Such a theory threatened to topple the entire superstructure of the existing classification of species by order of their appearance on the planet.

The human being is by no means the last link in the chain, since it had emerged long before many mammals which in turn had appeared before most species of birds. Since his ideas were in direct contradiction to all previous notions of established science, Quinton was forced to prove his point by creating a table of relative body temperature in a wide variety of species. At the time, it was officially estimated that the temperature of mammals varied between 37 and 39 degrees, and that of birds between 41 and 44 degrees. Quinton’s theory however, suggested that the body temperature of mammals began to vary as from 25C on, and that of birds, from 37C on.

To the casual observer, this kind of argument must seem on the level of an attempt to establish the sex of angels. What was really happening was that if Quinton’s experiments upheld his hypothesis, then all established notions would have to be submitted to an immense reclassification. And this was exactly what established science refused to accept. For Quinton, this was the crucial point, since his thermal theory was the cornerstone of a far broader concept. He had already put down the foundations.

Now the question was: if he were mistaken over the issue of animal temperature, then the whole structure of his theory would crumble to nothing.

Chapter IIP29

The Law of Thermal Constancy

If René Quinton’s ideas are correct, one would expect to find some startling surprises within the scale of animal temperature. He has his moments of doubt, but his mind cannot accept that he, an absolute beginner, might conceivably be right and the learned sages wrong. He submits to an examination of conscience, like all thinkers and innovators must do. Quinton does more than a mere innovator: he places himself in open conflict with ideas that up to now have been demonstrably true. So the young scientist, for a few months, strives to modify his thermal theory to fit the current fashion. But he is trapped in his own logic, which remains unassailable and will have its word.

This means that he must provide solid experimental facts through the measurement of animal temperature.

Quinton approaches Charles Richet, a physiologist who in 1889 had published a book called La Chaleur Animal (The Temperature of Animals). Richet gives René a warm welcome, hears him out and then proceeds to show him that his theory is an illusion, using all the classical arguments. Quinton is persistent; Richet smiles and writes in chalk on the blackboard: ‘All mammals have a temperature between 37 and 39 degrees.’ Quinton’s first skirmish with established science has not been the most successful, but he will not give up, and his tenacity is helped along by a stroke of luck. Even the most solid ramparts of conformist thought can sometimes be breached. Quinton meets Marey, an established scientist, who has retained the curiosity of a young man and the low profile of a researcher.

Marey is professor of Natural History at Collège de France and a member of the Academies of Medicine and Science. At 65, prosperous and highly respected, he is prepared to listen to the views of a complete unknown, who at the age of 30 has no scientific qualifications whatsoever.

P30Quinton describes his interview with Marey in a letter he wrote his friend Guy de Passillé on January 25, 1896.

“I got to his house at half after ten and left round quarter after midday. The next day he wrote me: ‘Dear Sir, could you meet me at home between 2 and 5 in the afternoon Thursday? I am very interested.’ So there I was Thursday at two, and only left twenty after seven, just before dinner. Tuesday he had said: ‘I have been studying the movement of animal species for over 20 years, and in all this time I have been groping for the reasons. Yet here you are, explaining them to me.’ Thursday he said: ‘For 20 years I have been examining animal viscera every single day: livers, kidneys, the lot: their differences, the form of their lobes, and here you are again, explaining it all.’ He is a slight, cool-mannered but charming gentleman of 65, who kept on repeating over and over: ‘I must do some very serious thinking...How is it that you can say so much in so few words’? He wants me to meet Milne Edwards and d’Arsonval and get me a contact with the Prince of Mônaco about invertebrates. He will give me the run of his laboratory at Collège de France, so I can start my experiments on the temperature of mammals in the Botanical Gardens. He wants me to become a physiologist, and said: ‘In the three pages you read me the other day it is clear that we need to spend an entire lifetime on experiments’.”

In 1904 when Quinton’s most significant study to date, Seawater, the Marine Environment, was published, he dedicated it to E.J. Marey. Marey died a few months later. It was as if he was waiting for this last homage from a young man with no formal scientific education, scoffed at by everyone, yet in whom Marey had recognized the mark of true genius.

P31So it was that Marey, himself a respected, almost revered figure, gave Quinton the means to penetrate the mysteries of the world of established science. Such is the role of luck in the fate of important men. Without Marey, Quinton would never have had the opportunity to demonstrate his work. On meeting Milne Edwards, the well-known naturalist, and D’Ansorval, he wrote:

“Thanks to Marey’s introductions, people smile at me, I shake hands with everyone. But the following day, after reading the letter of introduction…good heavens, what a welcome, what a reception, what references! One hand stretches out to another. But I must be prepared for the jokers. While some might seethe with humiliation, I just want to laugh.”

Quinton’s optimism is only to be expected, but in the euphoria of his first victory, he is not quite aware of the enormous significance of Marey’s support.

Quinton is now an assistant in the laboratory of Pathological Physiology of the Collège de France. Marey has obtained other advantages for him, such as the means to experiment on live animals. As Quinton writes his friend Guy de Passillé: “Now I have an official function. I put thermometers up the rear ends of animals and people respect me for it. You can take this literally…I am really respected, yes, Sir. Yesterday, when I took the thermometer out of the rear end of a hippo, my hand came out full of sticky green hippo shit. Now I bet Verlaine never had to face that!”

Goodbye to literature classes and salons. When Quinton is not working in the laboratory or at the museum, he is in England, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Egypt, on an impassioned search to find the animal species he needs in support of his theory. The kiwi (Apteryx) gives him the most trouble. It is the most ancient of birds, and according to his new classification, should have a temperature of 37C; the current system claims it could have a temperature of

no less than 41C. Quinton searches for a specimen, and finding one in London, confirms that its temperature is in fact 37.2C

P32Checking out the temperature of all these animals turns out to be a remarkable success. The temperature of mammals, far from being between 37 and 39 degrees, as Charles Richet had claimed, turns out to be in the range of 24C on the lower scale, represented by the platypus, going on upwards. Quinton’s ideas are also confirmed where birds are concerned. Some species have a temperature lower than 41C, contradicting what we have always believed and been taught.

So far, his experiments have shown that his hypothesis is correct. Temperature is in fact a criterion for the classification of species, showing their order of appearance on the planet. The last species to emerge are those with the original temperature of 44C, and the most ancient those that in order to compensate for the cooling of the environment had to learn to generate more heat to keep cell function going at 44C.

Quinton’s truly masterly contribution was his recognition that there is a cause-effect relationship between the cooling of the planet and the appearance of warm-blooded animals with the means to generate heat, a notion that was to open up new horizons leading to new kinds of therapy. Quinton’s hypothesis has become the Law of Thermal Constancy, which states the following:

“With the cooling of the globe, life, emerging in the form of cell activity at a certain temperature, will, in order to ensure optimal function, tend to maintain the temperature of its origin.”

P33To turn his hypothesis into a law, Quinton used his implacable self-criticism, taking every possible precaution against error. He stressed that organisms in decadence, whose temperature has been raised artificially, tend to produce acceleration of vital functions. Moreover, if an animal has a ‘fever’, it is in order to raise cell activity to a maximum to cope with invading bacteria. As an example, he quotes Jolyet’s experiment with the rabbit, whose temperature is 39C. A rabbit will quickly succumb to an inoculation with anthrax, but will resist well if its temperature is artificially raised to 42 or 43 degrees.

Quinton showed that life made its appearance at the optimal thermal conditions of 44C, and that the cell cannot survive at temperatures higher than this. But what if organisms were able to adapt to temperatures of more than 44C? In fact Quinton noticed that in the summer, insects bask in the sun on walls, much as lizards do on rocks, at temperatures that can reach 50, 60, even 70C. If his theory is correct, then cell life is impossible under these conditions. A lizard exposed to direct sunlight on a hot summer’s day, if immobilized, will die within 8 minutes.

“Something has been puzzling me all winter,” he wrote a friend. “I knew that the sun can raise temperatures to quite an extent: a week ago I got to measure 70C. Now my theory has it that insects die at 46 to 47C at the most. But the image that kept coming to mind was seeing an insect or a lizard basking in the summer sun. Now I am really happy with the results of my experiment. Try it for yourself: put a fly in a small jar exposed to the sun for a while: you will see it dies in a few minutes. The same with all insects: ants, butterflies, beetles. This is because right from the beginning of life, animal cells cannot become accustomed to temperatures higher than that of the ocean.”

P34At the time, Quinton’s law of Thermal Constancy was scoffed at and derided, causing much controversy. Scientists are only human and have their pride and their wounded feelings. It is hard for them to admit that ‘basic’ principles could be wrong, especially if the suggestion comes from a newcomer to the field, without a single reference from any of the great schools of science.

Comparative anatomy had placed birds quite low on the evolutionary scale, along with reptiles, but Quinton showed that some birds were in fact among the last to make their appearance on the planet. The Law of Thermal Constancy, far from placing human beings in last place on the scale, states that we emerged long before the birds, and long before certain mammals. All of which puts us at a lower level? This cannot be right! Quinton’s logical mind took into consideration the arguments of his critics, but he went on to state that the human being, as far as intelligence goes, may be superior, but who was to say whether intelligence was especially important as a means of classification? For example, a zoologist, when making a comparison between carnivores and proboscideans, would not think of comparing the relative intelligence of a dog and an elephant.

In reply to his critics, Quinton makes use of an argument rather hard to beat down: “It is not because I am clairvoyant that I have attributed all these temperatures to animals I had never set my eyes on. If my discoveries clash with your theories, never mind. My hypothesis has become the Law of Thermal Constancy. Anyone with a thermometer can measure and check out all my findings. How could I possibly have predicted things that up to now have been totally disregarded, if I had started out from false premises? It may be possible to bend the rules of mathematics to the point where 1+1=3, but you cannot make a false hypothesis give rise to accurate conclusions.”

P35This is where Quinton shows his particular genius. “Hypothesis is my right hand”, Kepler had said, long before Pasteur, Claude Bernard and Poincaré. But Quinton takes hypothesis to its absolute limit. He will not be content with vague notions and ideas based on general considerations. Quinton offers us a series of strict principles that appear to gather further strength when placed in opposition to the accepted doctrines.

Chapter IIIP37

The Law of Marine Constancy and the Vital Environment

Nothing comes from nothing. Spontaneous generation cannot exist even in the realm of the intellect. Even a genius must look back to his predecessors. To quote Musset, “You would have to be as dumb as a schoolteacher to boast that anything on the face of the earth has not been said before.”

But Musset is only partially right, for a new idea, because of the specific form of its synthesis and the nature of the creative mind that formed it, is, despite everything, something said for the first time. Just as the painter and the composer use already existing conventions to create an original work of art, the scientist gathers the scattered pieces of a puzzle of facts, and unites them to form a new concept.

René Quinton’s predecessor in this sense is Claude Bernard, who in turn owes much to Blainville’s definition of internal environment.

We know that in the beginning life emerged as an organism of one cell only. Embryogenesis which studies all the various stages of an organism, from ovum to birth, shows that we all originate from a primary cell, the fertilized ovum.

Yet during the nineteenth century, paleontology had already revived mankind’s ancient notion that life began in the water. Bernard showed that organic cells continue living in their original aquatic condition thanks to their aqueous internal environment. He expressed this idea for the first time in his book Introduction à la Médicine expérimentale (1865), which may be considered one of the cornerstones of modern medicine. But in his later work, he returns repeatedly to the same question, examining it in all its aspects, intending to elucidate the very same points.

P38He affirms that water is a primary need, indispensable to life. We distinguish between aquatic and airborne animals, but all distinction between these is restricted to the structure of their organic tissues. According to Bernard, all cells in living things exist within in a liquid internal environment and so are aquatic, that is, they are immersed in organic fluids containing a large amount of water. Even today, there are various opinions as to how much water this is exactly. Bernard estimated it could be as much as 90 - 99%. A recent issue of the magazine Diétique et Collectivités suggests that water accounts for about 60% body weight in the adult, and 70% in the newborn. I myself have found figures higher than this, but the differences are minimal.

When Bernard began his research, he revealed that the internal environment is made up of blood plasma, later on to include lymph. Finally in 1878 in his book Phenomena of Life, he defined the internal environment as the total quantity of circulating fluids in the organism.

The integrity of this environment is maintained by a series of regulating mechanisms. Living things, once they have reached a certain level of complexity, learn to protect themselves against variations and disturbances in the external cosmic environment, by maintaining constancy in the conditions of the internal environment. This is the very purpose of these mechanisms. Bernard believed that they include respiration, digestion, circulation, internal and external secretions and the action of the sympathetic nervous system.

Bernard’s fundamental idea is that of physiological autonomy. In a healthy person, the internal environment helps to soften the impact and neutralizes the aggression caused by the external and constantly changing world. The main function of the organism is to maintain the physiochemical constancy of the internal environment

He shows the tremendous breadth of this concept of cell life, establishing a synthesis between two apparently opposing notions:

P39 “There is an authentic internal environment found between living matter and the cosmic environment, in animals with a higher level of organization, made up of aggregations of elementary organisms, the cells. The maintenance of the internal environment is the primary condition for a free and independent existence: the mechanisms that permit this guarantee the maintenance, within the internal environment, of conditions necessary for cell life. This enables us to understand that there can be no independent life for simple organisms whose components are in direct contact with the cosmic environment; independent existence is exclusively the legacy of animals that have reached the height of complexity and organic differentiation.”

In this way, elementary organisms unable to ensure the fixity of their internal environment are not free in their relationship with the cosmic environment, but are like toys in its hands and slaves to its whims. “The fixity of the internal environment”, Bernard repeats,” presupposes a level of perfection such as may compensate for and balance out any external variations.”

Much later, Carrell was to say the same in his book L’Homme, cet inconnu ( Man , the Unknown ), in a very imaginative way:

“Within the organism, cells behave like small aquatic creatures, submerged in a warm and dark environment…Cells form societies we call tissues and organs…The structure and function of cells are determined by the physical, physicochemical and chemical properties of the liquid surrounding them…One cannot conceive of the existence of the tissues without the existence of a liquid environment…The internal environment is itself part and parcel of the tissues.”

The internal environment is then the primordial physiological basis of the organism, its ‘liquid matrix’, to use the expression of the American

physiologist W.B. Cannon, professor of Physiology at Harvard and the Sorbonne. Cannon’s work was only to be published in 1946, under the title of La Sagesse du Corps (The Wisdom of the Body). What is this wisdom, after all? It is simply to do everything possible, through several different ploys, to maintain the integrity of our internal environment. This American scientist states in his preface that the central idea of his book “The Stability of the Internal Environment in the Organism of the Higher Animals”, was inspired directly by the concise observation and deep understanding of the eminent French physiologist Claude Bernard, and “this book could be regarded as a tribute to his memory.”

P40In fact, Cannon’s book takes up the thread of Bernard’s work, but Cannon goes further. Quoting Bernard, who had said, “Every vital mechanism, whatever its form or nature, has one purpose only – to keep vital conditions stable in the internal environment” - he went on to say, “Never has a physiologist put anything more important down on paper.”

What makes Quinton’s work original is that he examined all Bernard’s ‘vital mechanisms’. These mechanisms or homeostatic devices regulate all the organs, different kinds of apparatus and physiological systems of the organism in a continuous struggle to defend the integrity of the “liquid matrix” against the outside world. The Russian scientist, Alexandre Bogmoletz, who died in 1956 and was President of the Ukrainian Academy of Science, wrote in his book How to prolong Life (1950):

“The essential condition to extend our lifespan is to ensure a periodical renewal of the internal environment: a kind of process of rejuvenation. This renewal, not unlike the renewal of an artificial medium of culture, is of immense value to cell vitality. New and far-reaching horizons are now revealed to medical science in its search for longevity. Medicine faces a task of immense importance: to learn how to modify the state of the internal environment of the cells and to find ways to cleanse, repair and renew it systematically.”

By placing emphasis on the study of vital terrain and making it physiology’s main goal, Bernard had made it only too clear that “We have to strive to unite all physiological phenomena, in all their myriad specialized manifestations.” He devoted all his attention to this, discovering the existence of the internal environment, and searching to define its nature. Quinton was to pursue the

same goal: the search, in all its possible forms, for the fundamental biological unit, or common denominator, of all living things, or at least of all the higher animals.

P41At the age of 30, Quinton’s knowledge was prodigious, even at a time when people read much more than they do today. What draws our attention when we read his letters, is that he takes nothing for granted; whatever comes from outside is submitted to and transformed by his originality, his persistence, in short his personality. Owing to his general knowledge, he was well-versed in practically all subjects, ranging from religion, philosophy, art and literature on the one hand, to several branches of science on the other. Needless to say, he knew all about Bernard’s work.

Bernard has established the fixity of the internal environment of higher animals in terms of its temperature and chemical composition, but he has not yet come up with a hypothesis on how this fixity came to be. Quinton with his theory of thermal constancy, which has now become a law of the same name, now shows that the most recent of the species, those with optimal cell activity, all have a temperature of 44C.

So it would be reasonable to propose as hypothesis that other original conditions have prevailed in these species. Even if the appearance of life is a physicochemical phenomenon in the immense furnace of the cosmic laboratory, we must not suppose that the conditions required for life are exclusively thermal.

Quinton knows that the cell must live an aquatic life, whether it belongs to a unicellular organism, or is merely one of the millions of cells of the human body. As he had shown, the first cell came to life at a temperature of 44C, that of the water in which it was immersed. This water had a specific chemical composition. At the time, there had been some hypotheses put forward in a tentative way, suggesting that this liquid environment may have been the ocean itself. Bunge, the Swiss scientist, for example, considered that in vertebrates, the presence of sodium chloride, or common salt may indicate the marine origin of the cell, but it seems that at the time, Quinton was unaware of this hypothesis.

Quinton’s visionary imagination takes him still further: from an inspired flash of intuition he builds a brilliant, but apparently dubious hypothesis.

Life began in the water, probably in the Precambrian period, when the planet was entirely covered by ocean. The water bathing the first cell was seawater at 44C. Quinton’s imagination bridges the timescale of the geological eras and the evolutionary chain of the species, finally to settle for the most recent representative of the animal kingdom, and a higher vertebrate, - the bird – for he has noticed that the organism of the bird has remained true to original thermal conditions. Then what if the internal environment had also remained just as true, in terms of chemical composition, to the original environment of the first cell? The internal environment of the vertebrate must be none other than seawater!

Quinton was later to say: “When my mind grasped this affinity, bridging the millennia, I must say I felt almost faint.”

He set feverishly to work. One look at the values of the chemical composition of the internal environment of vertebrates and those of seawater was enough to make it clear that there were stunning analogies between them.

Quinton was the first to see the proof, because the flash of insight had come from his own creative imagination. There appears to be a dichotomy between two kinds of mind among those we call scientists. One kind ploughs ahead with analysis, gathering new data to build up what information there is, and to examine at great depth various forms of mechanism, but ends up losing sight of the general whole: collecting data is their religion. The other kind of mind, Cuvier’s for instance, can reconstruct long-vanished structures from a single tiny bone. Their vision scans the horizon and seeks to place a phenomenon in its proper niche within a broader concept. Quinton’s mind clearly belongs among these, the true innovators, the pioneers of real knowledge.

Although the analogies Quinton had observed seemed to confirm his hypothesis, he was still at the elementary stages. He was wary of the rather haphazard methods available at the time to analyze with any accuracy both the internal environment of vertebrates and seawater. It would take a lot of further analysis before he could attempt to compare the relative chemical conditions in the internal environment and in the ocean. Quinton was not a placid man, whose work is sandwiched between reading the morning papers and putting on slippers at night. He longed to know right now, and could not wait out years of endless investigation.

Spending the necessary time to examine the details, but never losing sight of the general picture, Quinton’s aim was to justify his hypothesis in full. He had deduced that the answers would be of a physiological nature, but rather than glean facts from learned studies, he preferred to base his experiments on real life.

P43To understand better the scope of the experiments Quinton is now engaged on, we might stop a moment and look at his own definition of what Bernard called the internal environment. Quinton prefers to call it the vital environment. This is internal in relation to the organism, but external to the cell itself, which turns the word “internal” somewhat misleading. On the other hand, Quinton may have coined the word extra-cellular, still in use today. Despite Quinton, I prefer to call it the internal environment.

According to Quinton, the internal environment is the extra-cellular liquid that bathes the cells, enabling them to be nourished (whether through direct contact, or indirectly, through substances uniting and separating the cells) with everything necessary to support life.

The extra-cellular liquid is produced from blood plasma, lymph, the serous cavities of the body, and from the various kinds of plasma that can penetrate the permeable tissues, whatever their nature. The conjunction of these kinds of plasma makes up a homogenous whole whose composition is identical in all of its parts, and which is always in the process of being stirred up, purified and renewed by the circulation of the blood and lymph, or by mechanisms of diffusion.

The internal environment literally impregnates the organic tissues. It is not in itself a form of tissue, but a unique non-cellular liquid component of the tissues. It bathes all living cells, providing them with an environment favorable for survival and regeneration. The internal environment is quite distinct from living matter in the form of cell life, in the same way that a culture medium is distinct from the bacteria growing in it.

Chapter IV

P45Experiments

Quinton now faces the formidable task of checking over his data through experiment. If his hypothesis is correct and he can find examples in physiology to back up his ideas, it should be possible to remove part of an animal’s plasma, replacing it with an equal quantity of seawater. Theoretically, it should be possible to make this substitution on a fairly large scale. White blood cells, or leucocytes, which cannot survive in an artificial medium, may be persuaded to survive in seawater.

At this point, most researchers, however confident in the sure results of their hypothesis, would not have gone ahead without taking certain precautions. A certain amount of discretion surrounding an experiment ensures that if it results in failure, there is not much humiliation involved.

All the same, Quinton risks a more direct approach. In 1897, in the laboratory of Pathological Physiology of Collège de France, named for Marey, where Quinton is an assistant, he makes an announcement about what he is about to prove.

In the series of experiments he has in mind, he means to perform a total bleeding on a dog, and replace this lost blood with an equal volume of isotonically treated seawater. The term ‘isotonic’ will be explained as we go along.

The total bleeding of an animal ensures certain death if it is left to its own resources. What is more, apart from causing the removal of the animal’s internal environment, it also removes the cellular fraction that cannot be substituted by seawater. So on one side, respiratory function will be harmed through insufficient oxygenation, while on the other there will be a simultaneous loss of white blood cells, present in the circulating blood when the animal was bled. It is these white blood cells that would have normally been mobilized to deal with the inevitable infection owing to surgical intervention with negligible methods of hygiene. Total bleeding is the sure way to leave an animal at death’s door. But apart from this, survival is still less likely if there is a chance that seawater could have toxic effects on the organism.

P46If the experiment is to work despite all these factors working against it, seawater will have to provide a perfect analogy with the internal environment.

It should be remembered that with so many factors working against it, there is all the reason in the world to give up a theory and label it erroneous.

The following is an objective description of the facts demanded by science; even so, we can imagine the anxiety and trepidation our young scientist must have gone through. To quote Marey: “Quinton is a genius in this: he never fails to identify the one crucial experiment.”

Day 1: A dog weighing 10kg was submitted to total bleeding, with no precautions as to asepsis. The bleeding was effected via the femoral artery. 425g of blood, the equivalent of 1/20 body weight was removed within a period of 4 minutes. Absence of corneal reflex. Once it was impossible to remove more blood, the dog received an injection of seawater. 532 cubic cm of seawater at 23C were administered over the period of 11 minutes. Reappearance of corneal reflex.

On being released, the animal showed signs of apathy and reluctance to move. Once the dog was back on its feet, the scruff of its neck was flaccid, showing dehydration. Walking was erratic, and the animal was panting and short of breath. When laid down on a blanket, the dog remained passive.

Day 2: In the morning, 21 hours after being bled, the dog began to move. Its red blood cell count was down from 6.800.000 before the experiment to 2.900.000. Hemoglobin was down from 19 to 12. These figures show the extent of the bleeding performed.

Day 3: There was a change: the wound caused by the bleeding was inflamed, and the dog’s temperature was 40C. Depression and apathy were evident. The question now was whether the dog’s organism, weakened by the bleeding, would be able to resist infection. Would the injection of seawater be able to create conditions for the revitalization of white cell function?

Day 4: The dog’s condition was serious, but analysis of the blood showed red blood cell count at 3.020.000, white cell count at 24.000, and hemoglobin at 16. The same afternoon, the dog ate 400 grams of meat, and from then on, it began to recover fast.

On the eighth day, the animal was obviously cheerful and began to move its paws. These signs of vitality, in fact positive exuberance, become more pronounced over the next few days.

P47The vivacity and exuberance the dog showed was remarkable, and is a peculiar characteristic found in experiments of this nature. It is as if the organism has found greater energy in seawater than in its own internal environment. Five years later in 1902, the dog, called Sodium in commemoration of the experiment, died in an accident. Sodium not only survived, but went on to live quite a number of years, in terms of a dog’s lifespan, so this “super-vitality” is surely significant. Some time later, a doctor of medicine, Dr. Tussaud, reported similar results to those of Quinton, but using normal saline solution instead of seawater. On closer examination of the facts, it turned out that this dog survived only two months, remaining in a state of apathy, barely able to move. There is no comparison possible with Quinton’s experiment. Saline solution is but a poor substitute for seawater, as Quinton would go on to show.

This was not in fact the very first experiment, but the first of a second group, but it has been recorded first owing to its great impact

Charles Jolliot was later to write: “I myself, together with Dr. Hallion, watched Quinton’s first experiment being performed at Collège de France, and after 35 years I can still remember the astonishment of the three of us on seeing life come back to this animal, the way it got to its feet after being practically at death’s door.”

Quinton’s astonishment at the long-awaited success of his experiment is rather endearing in one who was always so sure of himself. One can imagine the even greater amazement of the sorcerer’s apprentices on seeing the doomed creature come back to life.

The first group of experiments may seem less impressive than the one just described, but they are very significant in the eyes of biologists and physiologists. It was proposed to inject seawater intravenously into a higher vertebrate. If the internal environment of the animal is a marine environment, then seawater should behave in the organism like a vital medium, that is, it should not produce toxicity.

P48

The quantity of seawater to be injected into the first dog is huge: 6.6kg in an animal weighing 10kg.

Here it is that Quinton’s audacity seems to go beyond reasonable bounds, since there is no reason why he should not have begun with much lower doses. The man’s genius resides in his visionary need to uncover the secrets of nature. He is compelled to challenge nature, provoking the wrath of the gods. It is not by chance that once again Quinton has loaded the dice against himself. Everything would lead to believe that you cannot inject such a massive quantity of what effectively is a foreign body into an organism, even if what is being injected is a vital medium. This is an immense overload on the body systems, whether the impact on the organism is sudden or prolonged, more or less severe, according to the speed at which the injection is administered. The kidneys alone would be working overtime to cope with eliminating these massive quantities of ‘alien’ fluid. The following is not Quinton’s experiment, but the information from the index card of an experiment performed by Dr. Hallion, member of the Academy of Medicine. His experiment is described here not because of his status, but only because Hallion undertook it to show just how far he could go to reproduce Quinton’s own experiment. A dog was given an injection of 10.4kg of seawater, the equivalent of 104% its own body weight, over a period of 11 hours and 40 minutes. This is as though one had injected a human being of about 60 kg with 62.4 kg of seawater over a period from midday to midnight. What is described now is the summary of Hallion’s experiment as it was submitted, like Quinton’s own experiments, to the Biological Society.

The dog, a cross-bred Basset, with an initial body weight of 10kg, rectal temperature 39.7C, was injected intravenously with 10.4 kg of seawater at a temperature of 30 to 45C. The injection was given over a period of 11 hours and 40 minutes. While the injection was being given, there were no signs of distress, no diarrhea, no albuminuria and all reflexes remained normal. The dog’s attention was on the surgeon’s every move and it responded to petting. The rectal temperature went down no further than 36.8C, going up to 37.2C once the injection was over. The dog had received 10.4kg of seawater, and eliminated 9.4kg of urine.

The dog got to its feet 1 hour and 10 minutes after the end of the injection, then began to walk about rather groggily, a little lame from having had his paws tied during the operation. After an hour and ten minutes, the rectal temperature was 39C. The next morning, 14 hours after the injection, the dog

was very cheerful and frisky, racing around the laboratory in the best of spirits. He then went on to devour two portions of 600g of meat and drink 100g of water.

P49The urine collected in the night had traces of albumin. Over the following few days, the dog continued much livelier than before the experiment. There was no diarrhea, vomiting or any other signs of disease, and albumin in the urine had gradually dwindled to zero.

Quinton was inspired to increase the scope of his first group of experiments, by injecting a dog all at once with so large a quantity of seawater as to make it impossible for the kidneys to perform the function of excretion, thereby transforming the organism into a mass of seawater. The dangers of such a procedure are enormous for the animal, since it places an overload on the body functions. Within 90 minutes he had injected 3.5kg of seawater into a 5kg dog. There was immediate abdominal swelling followed by a diminution of cardiac rhythm. The animal’s temperature went down from 38.2C to 32.5C. Renal excretion was greatly diminished and the corneal reflex had gone.

Once the injection had been given, there was a rise in temperature, renal function became more efficient and there was a return of the corneal reflex. The dog staggered on being released – there was still much abdominal swelling. After taking a couple of steps, the dog collapsed. With great effort, the dog managed to get to its feet. After eleven days, “the dog had recovered completely and was lively and alert in the extreme, considering it had spent the last five days or so shut up in a room in the basement. The animal’s weight remained the same: 5kg.”

Quinton now embarked on the third series of his experiments. These were so risky that his supervisors at Collège de France, Balbiani, Malassez and Henneguy, tried with the utmost urgency to dissuade him from taking them on, in the belief that they could only end in absolute failure. On the other hand, if anything really adverse were to occur, worse could not have been expected, given the difficulties he was faced with. Quinton himself was later to say that he found it hard to believe in the results. But then, he was one of those men who pride themselves on saying that to be able to act, there is no need to wait.

The chosen target this time was the white blood cell, or leukocyte, and if the young scientist could show that this cell type could survive in seawater, his argument would prove itself watertight. All other cells of the organism, with the exception of the white blood cells, live an entirely localized existence. The red blood cells, despite their presence everywhere in the body and their advanced motility, remain limited within a closed vascular system. It is only the white blood cells that depend on the overall vitality of the organism, remaining in contact with all the different kinds of tissue, within the more extensive of the systems at work in the body. But the white blood cell is so particular that it is unable to survive in any artificial medium. It is only the natural fluids in the organism that enable the white blood cell to survive.

P50Quinton performed his experiment on a fish, the tench ( Tinca tinca ), an amphibian, in this case the frog, on a reptile, the lizard, on three species of mammal, the rabbit, the dog and the human being, and finally on a bird, the domestic chicken. He collected the blood of every species and diluted it in seawater to observe whether life could survive or not in this new medium.

It was an overwhelming success: every time, the white blood cells immersed within a marine environment, showed all the signs of a perfectly normal life, in terms of adherence, refraction and amoeboid movement. So it would seem that in terms of the genealogy of the vertebrates, this third group of experiments demonstrates the adequacy of the original marine environment for cell viability.

Quinton and his group of scientists were now able to come to certain conclusions. In the first group of experiments, the animal was injected with a volume of seawater approximately equivalent to three times the volume of the internal environment. Quinton had calculated the volume of the internal environment as a third of total body weight, much less, in fact, than is estimated today. Since the kidneys had been eliminating urine at the rate of the application of the injection, the result was that at the end of the experiment, a large part of the original internal environment of the animal had been eliminated and substituted by seawater. In other words, the new internal environment bathing the cells of the organism was to a large extent made up of the seawater that had been injected during the experiment. The amazing thing was that substituting the internal environment of the dog for seawater, apart from causing no harm whatsoever to his vitality, seemed actually to enhance his liveliness and joy of living. By taking a look just at kidney

function it is clear that cells maintain their integrity in a marine medium: the dog’s kidney cells, that eliminate 150g of urine in 12 hours under normal circumstances, actually managed to eliminate a volume of 10kg, in other words, 60 times as much, in the course of this experiment.

P51In the second group of experiments, injection of seawater, preceded by total bleeding of the animal gave the same result: the recuperation of white cell function, with subsequent victory over infection, a fast recuperation of energy and an astonishingly swift recovery of red blood cell function. It had now been proved that sea water possesses all the qualities expected of the internal environment.

The third group of experiments showed that the white blood cell is the living proof that it is possible to provide a substitute for the natural internal environment of animals and, what is more, to guarantee the survival of one of the most delicate cells of the organism, the leukocyte.

Could this be a series of fortunate coincidences? The laws of probability deny it. The strict analogy between seawater and the internal environment of vertebrates cannot be explained away by mere circumstance, as has been frequently suggested. Birds and higher mammals may not live in or even off the ocean; they may not even feed off marine foods. They may be vegetarian, having little in common with the saline environment of the oceans. Yet they still possess the ability to retain their original internal ocean environment. Quinton’s second law now comes into its own: The Law of Marine Constancy:

“In order to maintain optimal cell function, animal life which appeared in the ocean in the form of cells, tends, throughout the zoological chain, to maintain the kinds of cell formed by the organisms of the original marine environment.”

Chapter VP53

The Law of Osmotic Constancy

Quinton now started another series of experiments, this time to examine the chemical aspects of his hypothesis. To understand Quinton’s reasoning, we must keep his main point in mind: cell life appeared under certain thermal and

chemical conditions which must be maintained if life is not to degenerate. When these external conditions are modified, life produces, at every stage of the process, a new model derived from the previous more passive model. This new species comes equipped with the ability to conserve the original conditions of the environment. At first sight there appears to be a paradox in that the recent arrivals to the chain of species remain true to the conditions of their origin, while the oldest are the most removed from them.

With the laws of Thermal and Marine Constancy, Quinton has established that the species higher up on the scale of living things conserve their original temperature through intense cell activity, that these species are the most recent to emerge, and that their internal environment is that of seawater.

There is however, an important difference: the saline component of the internal environment of the more recent vertebrates – mammals and birds – is 7 to 8 grams of salt per liter, while seawater contains as much as 35 grams per liter.

The Darwinists who had formulated the hypothesis of the marine origin of life, had explained the phenomenon after their own fashion: once removed from their marine origins, where the salt concentration is 35g/l, animals living on the earth or in fresh water yielded little by little to the conditions of their environment. Their environment became more depleted of salts, as did their internal environment. Such an explanation was of the kind Quinton refused to accept. His two Laws of Constancy led him inevitably to believe that the higher vertebrate had remained true to original conditions, since the concentration of salts in the ocean when life emerged was 7-8g/l, and that the sea had gradually accumulated a higher concentration since those times.

P54As a result, the closer a species’ internal environment resembles that of the ocean today, in terms of salinity, the older and more decadent the species must be. They submitted as a matter of course to the changes in their external environment, and their cell activity diminished because they were no longer putting up any resistance. It is always the same: the older the formula, the more decadent the species. Organisms resistant to decadence are transformed into new organisms.

We must bear in mind that the saline concentration of the ocean is a question of physics and has nothing to do with its chemical composition. The

concentration is subject to change, but the composition is unaltered. Sugared water will always be water with sugar in it, no matter how much sugar is dissolved in the water.

It becomes a little vexing to have to admit that once again Quinton was right. One would almost like to be able to catch him out just once and put him back among the mortals who make mistakes. But Quinton’s mental acuity, coupled with the flexibility and scope of his learning never let him down, although his paradoxical thinking could sometimes be annoying. In short, we could say that once his hypothesis has been matched to the real facts, everything conspired to prove him right. To establish a philosophy of science, or any philosophy, it is essential to make a definite choice between constancy to origins and subservience to change.

This remains true even when the choice involves a very daring hypothesis, and there is no proof available that life emerged in a warm ocean at 44C, with a salinity of 8g/liter. But there can be no doubt that Quinton’s experiments on dogs led to the development of valuable forms of therapy with a wide range of applications.

The inexorable logic of the Laws of Constancy led Quinton to provide an explanation for the phenomenon of concentration. In the course of cosmic evolution the enormous mass of the oceans underwent a change in its composition, while living things put up resistance. Life has very stringent demands and will not tolerate changes. However small and fragile it may be, the organism will reject, to a greater or lesser degree, any change that can influence it. The organism is the obstinate witness of the original concentration of the environment.

P55If there is constancy as to the original concentration of the oceans, as there is thermal and marine constancy, there are liable to be a few surprises once the facts are to hand. Quinton’s suggestion provoked smiles from the scientists of the time, who thought he had gone too far this time and that success had gone to his head. With his usual confidence, Quinton made no suggestions but went on to show that marine species, far from having an internal environment analogous to their external environment in concentration – 35g/l-, revealed amazing variations of concentration according to their order of appearance within the zoological chain.

Once again, against all the odds, everything turned out just as if….in a word, all the facts fitted with Quinton’s prediction. Official science must retract, and it was hard to contradict him when he stated:

“If my theory is wrong, can you tell me how it is I have been able to predict so much with such accuracy, when all that we have been taught up to now is so different?”

All marine invertebrates, very ancient and elementary organisms, remain in exact equilibrium with the marine environment of today; if their internal environment has a concentration of 35g/l, equal to that of the ocean it means they are in osmotic equilibrium with their external environment, with the ability to accompany changes in the concentration of the water of the oceans. But cartilaginous fish, which appeared much more recently and whose cell activity is much more intense, are by no means in equilibrium with the marine environment. Their internal environment shows a variation in concentration from 22g/l down to 20g, 18g, even 16g/l. Fish with bony skeletons, the last to emerge, take this difference much farther: they show concentrations as low as 11, 10 and even 9g/l!

As for the higher vertebrates - mammals and birds- these show a concentration of 7 to 8g/l. In fact these, the most recent of the species have the most intense cell activity of all, remaining true to the original conditions, despite the evolution of the external environment.

Why is it that this imbalance which Quinton had predicted and demonstrated to everyone’s astonishment became more accentuated as more species began to emerge?

P56Quinton’s hypothesis claims that marine invertebrates, on yielding to the increased salinity of the environment, began to succumb to a state of diminished cell vitality. New organisms evolved owing to fundamental or structural alterations that permitted them to maintain the original concentration.

In other words, invertebrates, by osmosis, can adapt to the environment surrounding them. If they belong to a marine environment, seawater also forms their internal environment; however, if the species has transferred to a freshwater environment, the internal environment will follow suit and be

forced to accept the inevitable result of diminished vitality. Quinton went on to declare that a species of freshwater mussel of the genus of anodonta is one example of diminished cell activity. It uses from 20 to 35 times less oxygen than the freshwater crab, whose cell activity is considerably more efficient. From this Quinton could deduce that the crab must have retained the marine characteristics of its internal environment.

Edmond Perrier. Director of the Museum of Natural History, made a protest, despite his great affection for Quinton and his enormous admiration of his work.

“If the permeability of marine invertebrates in the ocean fits in perfectly with your concept of osmosis, you will be stunned when you examine freshwater invertebrates. If, for example you study Homarus, you will see that its transformation into freshwater crab involved very few changes in its anatomy. You cannot suppose that this crustacean, on changing its habitat from ocean to river, could conceivably have closed itself off from its external environment so as to maintain within itself a kind of marine aquarium, thereby changing its physiology but not its anatomy! Similar anatomical form implies similar physiology, and consequently similar function.”

P57But Quinton is once again the winner. Edmond Perrier gave Quinton the run of the laboratories at Saint Vaast la Hougue and they did an analysis of the blood of the freshwater crab in order to show that its composition was almost identical to that of seawater and not at all that of the fresh water of its habitat. On moving away from the oceans to the rivers, certain species of Homarus managed to shut themselves off, by means of osmosis from the new environment, thereby conserving their internal marine environment. What is more, this had occurred without any changes in anatomy, but with physiological alterations in certain kinds of apparatus.

Quinton had no need of this somewhat superfluous information to be able to turn his third hypothesis into the third Law of Osmotic Constancy, which states:

“In order to maintain optimal cell function, animal life which appeared in the ocean in the form of cells, tends, throughout the zoological chain, to maintain the kinds of cell formed by organisms of the original marine environment.”

In the meantime, Quinton embarked on the thankless and exhaustive mission of proving that there is in fact an analogy between the chemistry of the ocean and that of the internal environment in the most recent species on the scale of living things.

Twenty years previously, in 1879, the Russian chemist Mendeleiev had formulated his classical Table of the Elements, which identified 92 simple substances, or elements, able to combine with each other to form the chemical combinations characteristic of all known matter.

Everything in existence is made up of atomically simple substances which can combine together. Carbon, for example, combines with other elements to form a variety of substances, from butter to marble, from wood to hair. On burning any of these substances, we will always find carbon which can never be changed into any other substance. Carbon is one of these 92 unchangeable elements. All existing matter in the world is made up of combinations of these simple elements, although the word that comes to mind is complexity, rather than simplicity.

P58Take sugar, for example: it is made up of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and calcium. One of the most elementary of substances is made up of two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen, forming a molecule of water; hence the well known formula H2O.

Using what methods were available at the time, Quinton proceeded as far as he could to analyze the chemical composition of seawater. He studied all the recent work available on the subject and cross-referenced the data. But he was not satisfied with the analysis. The specialists would only recognize in seawater the elements they could find by the available methods of analysis. Quinton wanted to add other elements to the list, such that had to be present, since they appeared in analyses of ashes from vegetable matter and sea creatures. So he made up his own much more extensive list.

Sodium and chlorine alone make up 84% of the elements contained in seawater. Sulfur, magnesium, potassium and calcium make up another 14%. There are another 10 elements that together represent a little over 2% and finally, in infinitesimal proportions, another 13 that account for a mere 0.0003%. This gives a total of more than 30 elements.

It is to Quinton that we owe the discovery in seawater of 17 rare elements, the existence of which had never been suspected.

On finishing this preliminary work, Quinton went on to compare the analysis of seawater with that of the internal environment of the invertebrates. The analogy between the two kinds of medium is significant in relation to 12 elements present in both, almost in the same proportion: these are sulfur, phosphorus, carbon, silicon, nitrogen, iron and fluorine. So far as the internal environment was concerned, that appeared to be the complete list. As a matter of fact, more recent studies have recognized the existence of no more than 12 to 15 elements present in the internal environment. To take an example: Lambling, in 1892 had declared in his book The Chemistry of the Fluids and Tissues of the Organism, “Among the elements known to us today, there are only about fifteen elements present in the structure of living things.

P59 Quinton reckoned that if his marine theory were correct, there would have to be present in the internal animal environment seventeen rare elements, the same elements present in seawater, and in the same proportions. He had anticipated the objections that might be made if he were to discover these hitherto unknown elements within the internal environment. It is of interest to reproduce the following text, as it shows the significance later research would attribute to the function of the rare elements, as we will call them.

“The fact that most of these elements are only found in infinitesimal and immensurable, or barely measurable quantity is of no relevance at all to the point being made. We have no right at all to declare that an element, though present in infinitesimal proportions, plays a secondary role in the organism. The zeros and stops in the dosage by no means define the relative importance of these rare elements to the organism, from the point of view of physiology. A cesium salt present both in the internal environment and in seawater and which can only be detected through spectral analysis, must be considered just as important biologically speaking, unless proven to the contrary, as the sodium and chlorine that make up all of 84 to 90% of dissolved salts. There is no reason why cesium or any other infinitesimal salt, should not have just as important a role in the support of life, whether in the ocean or in the internal environment of animals. Physiological microchemistry, though it is as yet very little understood, can leave us in no doubt as to the vital importance of some elements to life, in extraordinarily small doses, and only in these infinitesimal doses.”

How did Quinton propose to find these rare elements in the organism? It is here that we are shown one of the facets of his remarkable personality: from a brilliant hypothesis, he gets down to verifying the facts in enormous detail. He abandons the wings of the eagle to take up the plow of the patient ox. Element by element, from silicon to cobalt, through manganese, copper, gold, silver and the rest, Quinton proceeds to demonstrate their presence in the organism of the higher animals. P60 He achieves this through reading specialized studies and through his extensive private correspondence dealing with little known and unpublished work. He consults around 50 authors, many of whom have published more than one book. You have to have a real passion for scientific knowledge to be able to plow through all the exhaustive quantities of material on the subject of ‘Anhydro-carbonic Absorption in Decapod Crustaceans’ or ‘The Analysis of Intestinal Calculi in the Sturgeon’.

His patient and often monotonous labor provides him with the proof he is searching for. Of the seventeen rare elements found by him in seawater, he discovers that twelve are indeed present in the internal environment, namely iodine, bromine, manganese, copper, lead, zinc, lithium, silver, arsenic, borax, barium and aluminum. Three other elements are probably present: these are strontium, cesium and rubidium. Gold is possibly also present. Only cobalt remains elusive. His marine theory requires the presence of these elements in minute doses both in seawater and in the internal environment, and in similar proportions. Once this has been established, Quinton can annex his chemical proof to the physiological proof of his Law of Marine Constancy. He will have shown that the chemical profiles of seawater and the internal environment are strikingly similar.

It must be remembered that modern science, owing to the advanced means at its disposal has been able to confirm Quinton’s daring affirmations, but has never been able to relate them one to the other, as he did in his time.

Two American scientists, Gregory and Overberger, were the first to isolate the ninety two elements in Mendeleiev’s table from seawater. On the other hand, during the Sixth International Pathology Congress in Madrid in 1952, Didier Bertrand declared:

“Even neglecting to take into account all the work that has never been submitted to justifiable and much needed criticism, it may be considered as

proven that a new series has been discovered in the animal organism of fourteen metals and five metalloids.”

In this series are found all the elements that Quinton had predicted would be present. On the same occasion, Didier Bertrand affirmed that future research would be sure to provide new additions to the table of the elements.

P61Quinton had anticipated by 50 years what the American scientists were to discover. What is more, he had come to conclusions that are still poorly understood by modern science. A well known editor, Émile Gautier, director of L’Année Sientifique and La Science Française, wrote on several occasions that in accordance with Quinton’s predictions, all 92 elements would be found present both in the internal environment and in seawater. All the same, I have never found such a prophecy in all the vast quantity of Quinton’s unpublished work.

It should be noted that Quinton had always put much stress on a fundamental detail: all these elements are present solely in the internal environment. Only the internal environment has the same composition as that of seawater. Cell forms are quite a separate thing, as has been proved by analysis of the different types of body tissue. Every cell in the organism is bathed by the internal environment, whatever its function and whatever its special needs.

Quinton anticipates yet another objection: what if the presence of these elements is accidental, or subject to variation depending on the individual’s diet? He argues that even though the chief constituent salt in the environment is sodium chloride, the vegetable diet of higher vertebrates happens to be very low in salt. This could explain why herbivores are so avid for it. Eating is not a passive thing, but rather a matter of choice dictated by instinct. An animal will not eat just anything, but will reject quite a few food items and go after what it really feels like eating. The diet does not determine the chemical composition of the organism; on the contrary, it is the primordial chemical composition that determines the choice of diet. In this way the organism demands a choice of foods to meet the needs of the internal environment, which in turn demands the presence of regulating mechanisms.

Whatever the reason, it seems that a diet rich in seafood is of benefit to the organism. The American scientist, Price after concluding research that had taken him to all the five continents, declared:

P62 “While doing my research among ‘primitive’ peoples, I was especially struck by the superior nature of the physiology of those whose diet included a lot of seafood.”

The internal environment of the higher organisms on the scale of living things is simply an internal reserve of ocean water, whose elements are available to all systems of the body. Again and again, it can be proved that the internal environment is by far the most crucial factor at work in the organism, from the point of view of its physiology and biology. It is the liquid medium for cell life.

Quinton was now satisfied that the results of his work had provided the chemical proof of the validity of his marine hypothesis.

“At some point, the marine hypothesis is obliged to grant official citizenship of the organism to new elements which through understandable but erroneous reasons have not been taken into sufficient consideration. But way and above all, this hypothesis allows us to anticipate the function within the animal environment, of certain elements which are present only in minute doses. The horizons of the organism will certainly be opened wider once the function of these elements is discovered. New elements will make their appearance, and we will be able to predict the presence of others still.”

In short, within the organism, it is solely and exclusively the internal environment that has the mineral character and the marine features of ocean water.

René Quinton’s brilliant discovery was revealed, but then relegated to obscurity, to emerge again only today. There can be no doubt whatsoever of its relevance in future years. Quinton had cleared the terrain for research on the primordial function of the rare elements within the organism.

Chapter VIP63

The Law of Luminous Constancy

Before he came to any general conclusion about his work, Quinton proposed as hypothesis a fourth law, that of Luminous Constancy. The importance of the presence of light is so crucial to vital phenomena, that for a long time it had been taken for granted that the seabed must be totally uninhabited, since light could not penetrate to a depth greater than 400 meters. On being dredged, however, the ocean bed revealed the presence of a phenomenon known as phosphorescence. The inhabitants of the ocean depths were equipped with a light source emitted by organs found either on their external surface or at certain points of their external anatomy. The light produced was unbelievably bright.

In 1891, Paul Regenard wrote, after one of his fishing expeditions to the ocean depths, in a book entitled Experimental Research into the Physical Conditions of Aquatic Life:

“We brought some samples to the laboratory and then turned off the lights. There was a moment of pure magic in the darkness: in front of us was the most incredible sight ever perceived by human eyes...Just saying that it surpassed all imaginable firework displays is enough to give you a good picture of the spectacle. To give a good idea of the quantity of light produced, it is enough to say that from a distance of six meters it seemed possible to read the smallest newsprint.”

Quinton reasoned that in the absence of light in the external environment, life provides its own lighting system. Just as heat was generated in the cooling environment of the planet, light was reinvented by the inhabitants of the seabed. It is not white light, which does not penetrate further than a certain number of meters, but green light, the main source of light of the ocean. Quinton tended to believe that this phosphorescence helps to maintain intensive cell activity in certain species.

P64During the long years of Quinton’s research, Marey had paid close attention to Quinton’s work, and their letters are the proof of it. Right at the beginning of their relationship, Quinton’s theory of thermal constancy had helped clear up several points in Marey’s own work on animal mechanics. It was only to be expected that he should help Quinton in the pursuit of his experiments.

Quinton’s predictions had been confirmed in a wide selection of organisms, among them, mammals and birds. All of them had been proven with astonishing precision. The overwhelming logic of the marine and osmotic hypotheses had helped to confirm a whole series of new predictions diametrically opposed to established science.

In biology as in all science, a theory may be considered correct if it is able to establish through experimentation that everything must be just so. Quinton’s hypotheses had confirmed that the three hypotheses of thermal, marine and osmotic Constancy predicted three things:

the emergence of new facts and the necessity of these being proven; the unlikelihood of these facts, given the data of established science; the true nature of these facts to be proven by experiment.

Pasteur had said that you had to establish a scientific premise to be able to make predictions; by the time Quinton had finished his experiments he was able to declare:

“When you apply a concept to three different phenomena, made up of three different sets of entirely unexpected facts and all of these appear to fit together, it means that you have predicted the real state of events, so that your hypothesis becomes law.”

P65Quinton shows us what this concept is when his three laws are combined together to form a tremendous advance in scientific knowledge. From the beginning his hypothesis had acted like a conducting wire connecting the thermal, marine and osmotic characteristics of his countless experiments. His concept is now to become a law: The Law of General Constancy:

“Given all the possible variations that might have occurred in all the different kinds of habitat among animals throughout the ages, animal life which emerged in the form of the cell in pre- determined physical and chemical conditions tends to maintain throughout the zoological chain the conditions of its origins, for the sole purpose of being able to maintain optimal cell function.”

Claude Bernard had been opposed to the theories of his predecessors and had demonstrated the similarities between animal and vegetable life. He had shown that both the animal and vegetable kingdoms shared the same digestive and respiratory functions, and that they required the same constant conditions for life: moisture, air, heat as well as the same basic chemical structure within the environment. Strictly speaking, the cell is an especially vital element of the whole, remaining largely unaltered by the changes of form it has undergone. The cell is the concrete manifestation of life. Quinton’s new concept of evolution reveals the heroic tale of the cell in its virtual odyssey in confrontation with the hardships imposed on it by the hostile environment in which it is submerged.

It should be stressed that the tendency to maintain the original conditions of life has nothing about it of inertia. It suggests an inexorable purpose: to conserve the intensity of cell activity in animals. Quinton’s concept of physiology showed that this enhanced cell activity is only possible under certain conditions: the marine environment, salinity of around 8g per 1000g and a temperature of 44C. For cell activity to remain at optimal levels in spite of the increasingly hostile conditions of the cosmic environment, life needs to preserve the conditions of the original environment of the cells.

The philosopher Jules de Gaultier, referring to Quinton’s work, once spoke of “a kind of vital spirit” of creation and organization. Quinton spoke of this vital spirit as being a particular characteristic of the vertebrates.

Now that his three Laws of Constancy had become one general law, Quinton affirmed that there was a particular characteristic of the vertebrate that places it in the higher echelons of the animal kingdom. While the animal kingdom in general had yielded to the new cosmic changes, the vertebrates reacted differently: they refused to yield, doing all they could to restore the conditions favorable to intense cell activity.

They were unlike the invertebrates which were playthings in the hands of fortune; the vertebrates showed that were in control of new conditions. Quinton himself had said:

“The laws controlling both the external environment and the internal organic world have no power over the vertebrates. Whether by strategy or by force, the vertebrates have the ability to overpower the environment”.

It would be seen that Schrödinger and the vanguard of modern physics, over half a century later, were to do little else but widen the doorway that Quinton had first opened

For the first time, thanks to Quinton’s rediscovered genius, the theory of vitalism of the Montpellier school of thought had regained its credibility. With Quinton’s Laws, the human being was discovered not to be set apart from the rest of nature. In the midst of the physical world that surrounds and threatens them, humans are not alone in their struggle against new unfavorable conditions so as to ensure they have the environment necessary for optimal vitality. A single fish or mammal, whether it dwells in a hyper-saline aqueous environment, or in an icebound habitat, has been able to create an osmotic and thermal disequilibrium and so maintain essential physical laws in check. When human beings face up to the natural forces keeping them prisoner, and take control of those factors that can harm them, they are also showing this same vital spirit so characteristic of the vertebrates. Claude Bernard’s thoughts now take on a new depth of meaning, when he writes:

“The fixity of the internal environment is the condition necessary for independent life; there can be no independent life for simple living things as long as they are in direct contact with the cosmic environment. An independent existence can only be attained by animals that have reached the height of complexity and organic differentiation.”

P67Quinton had attracted much antagonism on the part of the scientific world when he demonstrated that his three hypotheses, thermal, marine and osmotic, were correct. But once again, his data required experimental proofs. His Law of General Constancy set Quinton against a formidable enemy, virtually the religion of the time, the doctrine of Evolutionism.

Evolutionism was neither homogeneous nor coherent as a doctrine. It began with Lamarck, to be taken up and amplified by Geoffroy Saint Hilaire, Darwin, Spencer, Buchner and Haeckel.

Lamarck spoke of a chain of species descended one from the other through heredity and adaptation to the environment. Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire had introduced the idea of embryogenesis. Among the higher animals this consists of a series of transitory and uncharacteristic stages, in terms of their species,

but in the lower animals their permanent status can be described as embryonic. Darwin introduced a new element to his theory of evolutionism: the struggle for life. This implies a natural selection of individuals and species. Quinton’s hypothesis appeared exactly when Darwinism, with the addition of a little bit of Spencerian philosophy, was the latest fashion. What then is, exactly, evolution?

Jules de Gaultier, in his book La dépendance de le morale et independence des moeurs, 1907 , claims that evolution is the idea that all living beings wherever they are placed in the chain, are descended one from the other. Plant and animal life are, in a sense, living laboratories of life. As new qualities and challenges appear, life becomes richer and more specialized over the millennia, in an attempt to achieve perfection. The sudden appearance of intelligence in one of the higher animals, the human being, suggests that this is what the endless effort of life has been leading up to.

P68In fact, Gaultier was under the impression that evolutionism was more cohesive in its views than is really the case. Within the doctrine there were two distinct lines of thought.

The first sees evolution as the play of external forces in constant motion upon the living world which gradually evolves by adapting to the turmoil of the cosmic world. Living matter is but a malleable substance that survives by bending its will to the blind dictates of the physical universe.

It is evident that life does change under new conditions owing to natural selection of species more able to adapt. But it is also clear that this process is passive. Darwin said that the ability to adapt was a matter of mere chance, survival being the winning ticket in a lottery.

So life is an aimless phenomenon, limited and meaningless, a mere biological manifestation. As Nietzche, through Zarathustra had said: “All is chance, horrifying chance.”

Such grass roots existentialism must have left certain free spirits in a state of anguish, leading to the development of the second line of thought within evolutionism, which aims for a kind of non-divine religiosity by making the human being the ultimate work of art on the part of creation.

Evolutionism by now had become a religion, with claims to the right of control over science and history, not to mention sociology, politics, morals, literature and the arts. Philosophers, politicians, aesthetes and critics made the greatest possible use of the concept to lend a new scientific allure to their ideas. By means of the evolution of the species, humanity should soon achieve a kind of perfection, a reign of bliss.

P69One of Quinton’s contemporaries described this mental attitude rather well: “There is a kind of fetishism, a certain tendency to idolatry that attracts people to Darwinism. They are not after a great new scientific hypothesis which may be abandoned the moment the facts contradict it. They are after a dogma, something intangible graven in the soul together with the Declaration of Human Rights”.

How does the Law of Original Constancy fit in with evolutionism? Before going into more detail about the animated debate that follows, it would be useful to look at the possible repercussions of the Law of Original Constancy on what is known as Darwinism.

Quinton takes life up at its point of origin, the cell. In the embrace of the vast changing environment, whenever it feels the need to correct what has up to now been a largely unchanging environment, the living cell either learns to place an internal environment as a buffer against the external world, or finds some other way to preserve the original conditions. The first stage of the battle is to create associations of cells to form organisms, like closed chambers, where the cell may find each and every marine salt it needs, in the right concentrations and under the required conditions of temperature. This is exactly what humanity would later be doing on discovering the use of fire, animal skins for warmth and housing for shelter. We could say, on the contrary, that the first cell anticipated the human social phenomenon in creating true societies on a biological level. However, as the cosmic environment is in constant and usually deleterious change, organisms accompany these modifications by transforming in such a way as to preserve optimal cell function, giving rise to ever more complex species, with more sophisticated forms of division of labor. In an attempt to preserve its fixed character, life struggles against the cosmic environment, mustering the capacity of the organism to alter its physiology and anatomy in an effort to protect the fundamental unit of life, the cell. The founder of physiology,

Claude Bernard, had already expressed his concept of fixity and constancy, but he had not placed it on any timescale, whereas Quinton had placed constancy together with the emergence of life itself.

P70This is in direct contradiction to the evolutionism of the time: where what is essential is concerned, life refuses to adapt. The changes life makes in organisms have as their goal a refusal to accept compromise. This refusal could be considered as a protest against the decadence of the organism and the return to disorganized chaos and eventual annihilation. Quinton’s imagery is striking when he defines evolution not as a kind of obedience to hostile cosmic forces, but as life’s insurrection against any forces that might prove to be harmful.

In the course of evolution, the cell refuses to adapt to anything that might cause its decadence. It puts up barriers and pitches battle against the changing conditions of the external environment, so that in the end it is the environment that must adapt to the cell.

This is no flight of fancy, but a concept based firmly on the countless experiments performed to prove the three Laws of Constancy. Life shows us that it has a will of its own, intelligently capable of putting up a formidable defense against the environment in an unceasing combat, which includes occasional strategic withdrawals, reminding us here of Darwin’s inexorable natural selection, though from a rather different perspective. In this way, life creates and rehearses innumerable scenes designed to protect its integrity. Life puts up a very flexible resistance, at the same time engaging in active combat with the changes that threaten to weaken it: one could say that life takes advantage of change to ensure the best for itself. Now such a concept is indeed much fuller, more attractive and intellectually stimulating than an evolutionism that attributes all the power to mere chance in the form of natural selection.

Where, then, does this place Man in the general picture of life’s adventure? From some of Quinton’s work one might conclude that the only purpose of life is to carry on the struggle by bowing to the dictates of our origins: “All the history of evolution”, wrote Jules de Gaultier, “is no more than a series of wise measures taken by living matter for its survival, and biology as a science can be seen as a closed circle. Biology is not the peristyle through which we gain access to the secret shrine of a temple. Biology is closed in its own

sanctuary and life, in the strictly physiological sense of the word, is the sole protagonist in the story of the cycle as told by biology. Biology absorbs all our interest. Biology makes no announcements, but shows us at the same time the beginning of things and their end.”

Now this is the realm of philosophy, and by extension, the arbitrary choice of conclusions. Jules de Gaultier, as we shall see later, could have unreservedly made use of Quinton’s work to justify his own concept of life, had he been another kind of person, and twisted his arguments around to suit his own diametrically opposite value judgments. But Quinton’s opinions deserved at least to be respected, though Gaultier was careful not to let his own bias influence his scientific work.

It is true that Quinton had said that the human race shares the ‘vital spirit’ of the higher vertebrates when it uses its resources to create an artificial environment, initially for its protection, but later on to establish mastery over nature so as to suit its own purposes. On the other hand, Quinton never denied evolution; in fact he himself wrote: ‘Do these Laws of Constancy in any way exclude evolution? On the contrary, they are in no position to deny evolution, since new organs must have had the purpose of protecting living things from outside influences and of maintaining the original and permanent conditions that permit intense vitality.’ Darwin’s mistake had been to want to enslave biology to anatomy. Quinton showed that if anatomical form is able to change, then it is exactly for the purpose of allowing biological values to be maintained at a high level in terms of vitality.

So it could be said that Quinton provided the finishing touches to the evolutionism started by Lamarck and Darwin, thanks to his synthesis of biology, physiology and anatomy. All the same, he offended the mystical and quasi-religious aspects of evolutionism which saw man as the summit of all creation. Quinton’s intention, from what can be gathered from his published work, was not to provoke debate over philosophical considerations; it is clear that he had found other means, based on science, not metaphysics, to create an analogy for the destiny of the species.

It is too soon to reveal some of Quinton’s work, since much of it requires slow and careful examination, being so extensive in its scope, but it may be of interest to quote a passage from one of the chapters of his as yet unpublished book La Science de la Sensibilité (The Science of Feeling). This passage seems to me to show us the vast scope of his concept:

‘Once the vital spark had been found, I do not believe that nature needed to pursue with the transformation of species. Man holds in his hand the crucial weight of the balance in the gradual cooling of the globe. Man appears to be master both of himself and of the life of the species. Geology is the witness to the enormous number of species that have long since disappeared. Man, for a long while yet, at least as long as it takes before he discovers some form of chemical food, will permit the existence of those species that please him, for example, the horse. This presupposes a much more ample hypothesis, taking us to the day when the sun goes out, when Man will have such power, that if the sun were to reappear, he would need it no longer. What people call the end of the world does not seem to me to have much sense.’

P73Chapter VII

Seawater: the Organic Environment

In March 1904, Edmond Perrier, in a session at the Academy of Sciences, made the presentation of a book whose title seems somewhat enigmatic, but which, to the agreement of everyone present, could not have failed to arouse enormous interest. L'Eau de Mer, Milieu Organique, fresh from the printers, had been brought to the attention of the scientific world, upon which it was immediately to cause great impact. Marey was overjoyed to present this book to the Institute, since he had followed the process of its writing, and had already shown parts of it in several communications, both to the Academy of Science and to the Biological Society. The book was dedicated to Marey, who was seriously ill at the time and who was in fact to die within a few weeks. Marey handed over to Perrier his task in the encouragement of the young scientist's ideas. Perrier was not just anyone: he was professor and director at the Museum of Natural History, as well as a member of the Academy of Science, his name never to be forgotten in the sphere of the natural sciences. Apart from this, he had already been 'quintonized', to use an expression then in vogue. But in March 1904, Quinton was a virtual unknown quantity, who at the age of nearly forty had not a single initial after his name. All the same, Perrier introduced him to another group of sages, most of them grey-bearded and crowned with several laurel wreaths. Quinton's book aroused such

interest, if not passion, in scientific and other circles, that it would be of interest to know his state of mind while he was in the process of writing it:

P74'I have been working on a chapter of my book which I have entitled Biological Chemistry; my idea was of a rough sketch', he wrote a friend. 'I have had the luck to find the information that confirms my predictions. Now I have the means to show the striking opposition that exists between living matter and the vital environment: the two mineral environments are in direct opposition one to the other. This is a crucial point, since it throws a lot of light on the subject of biochemistry. I have been studying this new science and think I am fairly well versed in most of the recent work on it: the days go by, but the horizons are gradually opening. You have no notion of how much light is reflected back to us through knowledge: it truly raises us to the status of gods! There is something of the impious in Man when he denies himself the acquisition of knowledge. I tremble when I look at the heading of a chapter that deals with a subject I know nothing of: mechanics, physics, mathematics, celestial mechanics and other innumerous subjects that I never dreamt of knowing the smallest thing about.'

But Quinton betrays nothing of this tense apprehension in L'Eau de Mer, Milieu Organique . In this monumental work of five hundred pages of small print, complete with analyses, tables and accounts of experiments, the spirit of science makes no concessions to imagination. We are filled with admiration when we follow the thread of the thinking of this genius, as he first makes an observation, then follows it up with a hypothesis with rigorous sobriety, then analyzes to the smallest detail the nature of the problem, gradually establishing his syntheses and backing them up with experiment and finally stating his Laws.

Quinton shows the same concern as Claude Bernard in making his demonstrations as ample in their scope as possible, so that no doubt may be cast on his conclusions, whatever the objections to his premises. He begins by showing the aquatic origin of all living organisms, a notion that had already gained much acceptance at the time. But he does this in such a way that Marey, on receiving his notes, writes:

"Perrier has read your work and finds it very well done: he makes the observation that most modern zoologists agree on the aquatic origin of the

animal and vegetable kingdoms. Although your work does not state anything new, its merit is in the fact that it is most comprehensive and clarifying." It is in this same scientific spirit that Quinton, before going ahead to tackle the essential content of his work, makes a point of first establishing without a shadow of doubt, the marine origin of all living things.

P75Once he has leveled his terrain, he puts forward a highly original concept which was to shed a great deal of light on the study of physiology. Quinton divides the organism into four compartments. He is the first to propose a simple notion that helps towards a perfect understanding of the nature of the animal organism which naturally includes all the physiological systems and the organs. These four compartments are: the vital or internal environment, living matter, dead matter and secreted matter.

Within the internal environment, there is living matter, the full set of all the different cells of the organism. The internal environment is the source of all the nutritive elements extracted by the cell. It is also where all products of cell metabolism go when they are excreted. Dead matter, the product of living matter, is the sum of all cell products whose function is purely physical or mechanical. It includes connective tissue, epithelium, cartilage, bone, teeth…Finally there is secreted matter, the end product of cellular activity catering to the needs of the organism.

Quinton's book then goes on to an extensive development of this concept: a lot of this material has already been submitted to examination by several scientific societies. He places much emphasis on his marine theory, since he knows that his theory is not the only one. He devotes twenty pages to the Laws of Thermal and Osmotic Constancy. Finally, he presents his Law of General Constancy: he means to make it clear that his book was written almost solely to demonstrate the Law of Marine Constancy.

There are not many examples like this of books so rigorously scientific in nature, yet able to arouse the interest of a fairly widespread public, and provoke reaction in so wide a circle.

I once spent a week compiling, rather than actually reading, a collection of articles published about Quinton's work in all the dailies, weeklies, monthlies and scientific reviews from all over the world. From 1904 on, serious in depth articles were to be published all over the world, heralding the arrival of a

French Darwin. In the United States alone, for example, articles about Quinton were published in twenty two newspapers from New York, Chicago, Los Angeles , Boston, San Francisco and Pittsburgh . Indeed there were few countries in the world, from Paraguay, through Siam and to Iceland, that were unaware of his work.

P76 But is in France where we can best observe the scope of the repercussions in all directions of Quinton's work. The press has shown its enthusiasm: over and above the scientific rigor in Quinton, he has captivated his public by appealing to their sentiments.

Here are some of the more lyrical quotations"Quinton is one of the Evangelists of modern science.”

"René Quinton's ideas are among those where the imagination of science surpasses that of the poets...they open the horizons of the world to a vast number of phenomena.”

"After Copernicus and Newton, the sky changed its appearance so that people began to see it with new eyes. After René Quinton, the ocean takes on a new aspect and our descendants will look at it in quite a different way from how we look at it. The great mystery of the ocean, as predicted by the visionary Michelet, has finally been penetrated."

"The bird in its flight, the dog that comes bounding to greet us, and we humans ourselves are all made up of two thirds of our own body weight of seawater. This ocean water moves the bird's wings, puts the sparkle in the dog's eyes and makes our hearts beat. This is a concept beyond the wildest dreams of an Edgar A. Poe, yet which appears to be proven through observation of the facts."

"When we imagine that the blood that warms and animates all beings, brings grace, beauty, color and passion to the body, and inspires divine thoughts in the spirit is none other than the ocean tide as it breaks upon the cliffs and shapes the contours of the beaches, we begin to understand the reverence of the Hellenes for Venus, mother of gods and men, who was said to have been born from the ocean."

"The theories and work of Quinton have done nothing less than cause a veritable revolution in science and philosophy."

"The masterful research of the young scientist, René Quinton, is on the verge of transfiguring biology."

The scientific reviews are more restrained, but are equally generous with their praise:

P77"There is nothing here of legend: all is reasonable and convincing, there is nothing more beautiful or grandiose", to quote the review L'Université de Paris… "This scientist has revealed a cycle that contains all we need to know about the human being throughout time and space."

In the opinion of the scientific chronicler, Emile Gautier, L'Eau de Mer, Milieu Organique is a monumental work only to be compared with Darwin's Origin of the Species . In many of his articles, he makes it clear that nothing as important has appeared since Darwin . This gives us a good idea of how highly Quinton's work was regarded

But to think that this enthusiasm for Quinton is unanimous would be to ignore the power of prejudice and the weight of inertia. It is clear that from all sides there is a counter attack from the supporters of Darwinism. These look on in a kind of outraged astonishment as Quinton questions what has up to now been regarded as infallible dogma. They have not understood or they refuse to believe that Quinton's concept does not reject evolutionism; on the contrary it gives it a new dimension.

A good example of this kind of mentality can be seen in this extract from a violent diatribe published in one of the more widely read newspapers:

"Where the shoe really pinches is when Mr. Quinton raises himself to the status of Darwin's rival, by challenging progressive evolution with his so-called Law of Constancy. According to Mr. Quinton, there is stability, immobility and impossibility of progress. Does that mean that there is no progress from mollusk to fish, from reptile to mammal, from ape to man? Is there no progress from Bushman to European, and, at the risk of appearing boastful, to Parisian? The scientific facts point not to fixity, but to variation. And under normal circumstances, the inevitable corollary of variation is progress, first physical, then intellectual and finally social."

Behind this kind of self-styled 'scientific' argument which is in fact entirely erroneous, it is fairly obvious where it is that the shoe really pinches. This is the classic reaction of the believer in desperate need for his religion, when he feels that his god is threatened by new ways of thinking.

P78Quinton, with his odyssey of life since its origins, like Homer, seems to have had his own Zoilus. The following passage is taken from El Correo Catalan, a Barcelona newspaper:

"We have never been able to understand," the author of this pamphlet writes, "the meaning of a saying we use when someone tries to deceive us with malicious insinuations. The saying is: 'Te veo, besugo!' (I can see you, porgy!)* Well, now we can understand the meaning of the following:gracis à René Quinton que debe ser un atun aunque segun el run run es sábio de profesion.

Only a tuna can know what was going on under the sea at a time when there were no men on the earth. As far as I am concerned, I would have Quinton locked up in a cell as a crazy madman, the cell that he occupied in the sea in the form of a fish. So we can say, in Darwin's case: 'I can see you, ape', while in the case of Quinton, that madman in need of a straitjacket, we can say: 'I can see you, porgy!'"

*besugo- European red porgy ( Pagrus pagrus) – a species of fish

'Thanks to René Quinton, who must be a tuna, in spite of rumors that he is a scientist.'

P79Chapter VIII

Life in Opposition to Entropy

It was to be another two years before Quinton would receive his laurels. Pasteur's career was very different: at first he was almost entirely misunderstood; he was sneered and scoffed at and had to battle with all his

might to get his ideas and theories accepted. But once he had reached the throne, he reigned supreme. Quinton had appeared out of the blue with no letters after his name like Pasteur, yet Marey, who had all the support of the world of established science, had taken him under his wing.

In October 1906, two years after the publication of his book, Quinton was finally blessed with the approval of the elite of the scientific and intellectual world. This at least meant that he had been officially accepted: a précis of Quinton's hypotheses was submitted to the French Institute, in a ceremonial session in the presence of the members of the five Academies. The master of ceremonies on the occasion was Albert Dastre.

It is important to understand the significance of this event. Albert Dastre had been one of Claude Bernard's favorite students; besides this, he had made a lasting name for himself through his publications and studies. By 1906, he had been appointed secretary to the Academy of Science. Quinton, in contrast, was almost entirely self-taught.

Dastre's position was unequivocal: at the end of his speech, with a striking turn of phrase, he summed up the points in common between Darwin and Quinton, in spite of their opposing doctrines: "Darwin teaches us that that obedience to the law of adaptation is a characteristic of the form of animals: Quinton teaches us that resistance to the law of adaptation is a characteristic of the life of animals." There could be no better way of doing justice to Quinton than by showing that he had proven the supreme importance of biology in the examination of vital phenomena, and had put Darwin's work in its proper perspective, that of anatomy.

This puts us face to face with a rather disturbing thought, liable to cause some anxiety, if we are to consider that there is a connection between natural history and history per se, and that the laws of natural history might well affect the human condition.

P80Quinton's concept appealed to the lay public, including the better educated classes, since it was founded on strictly scientific principles, but acceptance on the part of those who considered him unqualified to make a judgment would require a lot more trouble. He had to show a suitably humble approach in order to win the approval of the sages and the specialists.

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, there had been no notable advances in evolutionism; despite the importance of the theory of mutation, it had not changed in any way the essential evolutionist concept. There were several positions: certain scientists like Marey, Perrier, Dastre, Hallion and Grasset had evidently committed a serious blunder in accepting Quinton's conclusions and comparing him to Darwin; others were in total ignorance of the general Law of Constancy; still others were aware of its existence, but had rejected it.

The session at the Institute had immediate repercussions. Those with objective and impartial minds followed Dastre's suit, such as the writer Paul Adam, who is almost forgotten today, but well known at the time. Adam wrote in Le Journal:

"M. Dastre has assured us that Quinton's discoveries are of the utmost importance. The serious consideration of this eminent scientist's judgment establishes beyond doubt the validity of M. Quinton's work… Quinton's law of constancy is being set up on a level with Darwin's law of evolution. Darwin's work had immense repercussions in the world of science, literature art and even politics; several hypotheses and systems have been built on the continuation of his ideas. In the same way there are innumerous repercussions, both moral and spiritual, of Quinton's concepts: the consequences derived from the principle of constancy can be no fewer than the repercussions of the theory of evolution. There are a thousand aspects to the concept of the origin and destiny of the oceanic human being. Once more the principles of transformation and conservation have been acknowledged indispensable to life, society and the individual.      But Quinton's critics would not admit defeat. His work had gone way beyond the limits of scientific knowledge. The first to lionize him were the intellectuals: Jules de Gaultier found in Quinton the biological explanation of bovarism, while Rémy de Gourmont discovered a law of intellectual constancy. In politics, left-wingers and right-wingers alike looked for in Quinton's work the justification of their principles.

P81The editor of the socialist party publication L'Humanité, owned by Jean Jaurès, wrote:

"Here is a human being blessed with a mind of immense precision. René Quinton has translated the myth of Venus into the language of science. His theory leads us to a series of conclusions of rare originality, supported by the finest argument and the most rigorous of experimentation, enough to disarm all but the most stubborn of skeptics. There can be no doubt that where natural philosophy is concerned, nothing more important has appeared anywhere since Darwin ." Along with the left, the right, including L'Action Française lost very little time in paying court to Quinton. Paul Bourget, Maurras and Léon Daudet saw in the laws of constancy a reevaluation of their traditionalism. Georges Valois, a militant member of the extreme left made a loud announcement of his conversion to, of all things, the monarchy. At a time when the passion for politics was at its height, such an event gained an importance that could not fail to lose Quinton the support of the democrats.  So while Maurras wrote: "This book is magnificent in its order, precision, method and in its conclusions, from which our thesis can obtain much support", Georges Guy-Grand shows just how much these efforts to annex Quinton reveal of the party allegiances of the time: "Basing their arguments on Quinton's concept, M. Valois believes he can make an indirect deduction of a philosophy of authority, and Paul Bourget one of conservatism. But Rémy de Gourmont has made a yet more ingenious, or perhaps one should say illegitimate deduction of a philosophy of revolt. For M. Quinton does in fact allude to the revolt of the vertebrate which refused to be annihilated by the conditions of the environment. The revolutionary who refuses to bow his head must surely share the spirit of the vertebrate. So it is that the same scientific concept can be made to justify any one of countless contradictory theories. Let us make haste to state that it cannot be made to justify any of them scientifically."

P82 We can get a good idea of the intellectual turmoil stirred up by Quinton in a book with a title none other than The Laws of Quinton and the Bible, with the Bible coming in second place! The author, Dr. Louis Raffalli, who held several offices and had received scientific medals, went as far as to compare Quinton with Moses, claiming they complemented each other.

All of these impassioned reactions make it clear that the laws of constancy had created a tremendous stir in all the important circles of the time. Jules de Gaultier had been quite right, when Quinton's book had just come out, in predicting that Quinton's laws would have immense repercussions in the world of philosophy, morals and politics.

Nonetheless, it is at the highest echelons where science meets philosophy and metaphysics, in the crucible where the values of the future are to be determined, that Quinton's works achieve their aim. He is fifty years ahead of his time, and it is up to us to make a thorough reevaluation of his work.

At this point some extra attention is needed. Here is a notion which may be far more significant to us than the conquest of the moon or the planet Mars, but which is quite hard to assimilate, since up to the present time, very little of it has been revealed except through the strictly scientific media, with very few exceptions. This is entropy, "this formidable concept that crept up and caught us unawares."

Most nineteenth century scientific thinkers believed in the absolute unity of the phenomena of matter*. The world of living matter and the world of inorganic mineral matter were subject to the same physicochemical laws. The key to this concept is to be found in the second law of thermodynamics, which deals with entropy (from the Greek word for return).

* There had always been the so-called vitalists who rejected this concept and claimed that organic life could not be subject solely to the laws ruling the mineral kingdom.

P83The second law states that there is a continual decrease in the available energy in all successive stages of matter; in other words there is an inevitable tendency toward annihilation or at the very least toward a state of atomic chaos. The second law of thermodynamics shows that within all the physical changes to which matter is subject, there is degradation in the form of heat. This degradation is what is known as entropy. Entropy is not a mere concept or philosophical idea, but a measurable physical magnitude, according to the physicist Schrödinger, such as the length of a rod, the temperature of a specific part of the body, the heat of fusion of a crystal or the specific heat of a substance.

According to this principle, our universe is entirely ruled by these physicochemical factors. For a certain period of time, our planet went through a stage of creative expansion, beginning with atoms, to extend to molecules, finally to reach the variety and complexity of the living organism. But then this period of expansion gave way to a process of degradation: "Entropy is the tendency toward molecular dispersion as well as the tendency for it to be maintained in this state", according to Jean Mercier, professor of the Academy of Science ( Réflections sur l'entropie et le deuxième principe de la thermodynamique, 1946), (Reflections on entropy and the second law of thermodynamics).

The idea of entropy can be better understood if we consider the fate of the pyramid of Cheops. In a gradual but fatal process of dissociation, it is destined to become a mound of sand that is eventually doomed to collapse. Each grain of sand will then be broken down into molecules, in the process known as molecular dissociation described by Jean Mercier; each molecule in its turn will then liberate the atoms that make up the molecules. The pyramid obeys the fundamental law of entropy, which "simply expresses the natural tendency of things to reach a state of chaos". The whole universe follows the same pattern of dissociation or annihilation. In the state of the atom, a substance will always exist, but the bodies that are made up of this substance will always find themselves in a state of dispersion, a kind of atomic state of chaos, according to Schrödinger.

Quinton's Laws of constancy which were formulated on the basis of multiple experiments are in direct contradiction to entropy. Organic life, at least in the most recent and the highest of the species, appears to escape this degradation of energy, putting up a successful resistance against it and, what is more, actually appears to take advantage of the physicochemical environment, in order to construct the exact opposite of entropy. Half a century before the advent of modern physics, Quinton reveals his theory of "negative entropy".

P84I have read through a vast amount of Quinton's unpublished writing, both his scientific work and his correspondence, but I cannot be sure if he had predicted the vast scope of the consequences of his laws of constancy. The only man who seemed to have done so, was a young philosopher, Henri Bergson.

In his book Evolution créatrice (Evolution, the Creator), which was published two years after Quinton's L'Eau de Mer, Bergson declares: "Although my general conclusions are very different from Mr. Quinton's, our lines of thought are by no means irreconcilable." Bergson went on to attack the principle of the degradation of energy expressed by the second law of thermodynamics, and denied that entropy was a dominant factor in organized living things:

"It is up to life to create for itself a form appropriate to the circumstances imposed on it. Life must take advantage of these conditions, rejecting their disadvantages and making use of their benefits; life must react to external stimuli by constructing devices to control them…It is as if life is determined to waive the general laws (of inert matter)…Life behaves like a force which left to itself would take the opposite course". This is clearly inspired by Quinton: Bergson shows us as much, when he speaks of "analysis that shows that life makes an effort to continue uphill despite the downhill path taken by matter", because the only analysis of this nature that had been made up to then was Quinton's.

Forty years later, in 1948, the Nobel prize winner Erwin Schrödinger, known for his work on wave mechanics, published a book entitled Que'est-ce que la vie, l'aspect physique de la cellule vivante (What life is, the physical aspect of the living cell).

P85Schrödinger made it quite clear right from the start that he was comparing his own approach to the question as a physicist with the approach taken based on the experimental data of the biologists concerning cell behavior. From his comparison, he deduced that physics made a mistake in applying the laws of entropy to organic life. Quoting Maurice de Broglie, he stated that "the phenomena of life do not appear to obey the second law of thermodynamics: in fact they appear openly to flout it". In Schrödinger's view, "life is the ordered and regular behavior of matter and is not tied to the tendency of matter to move from a state of order to one of disorder; rather it is based on an existing order which must be maintained". He goes on to speak of "the astonishing ability of the organism to muster the energy required to maintain order and to escape atomic chaos, recreating order in an appropriate environment". Order depends on the conservation of complex living things, while disorder threatens them with annihilation.

 How was Schrödinger to call this new concept? When he made the distinction between the classical concept of entropy, positive entropy, and its converse, negative entropy, he made a point of showing the inadequacy of the terminology, saying that it was unsuitable for biological models. Some time later Jacques Ménétrier coined the term anentropy to take the place of negative entropy.

Although Schrödinger knew very little of Quinton's work, he had discovered much of what Quinton had demonstrated through his laws of constancy. Schrödinger spoke of "the wonderful ability of the living organism to slow down on its descent toward death", saying:

"This seems to suggest that the higher temperature of warm-blooded animals gives them the advantage to be able to abandon entropy in search of more efficient forms of cell metabolism".

Schrödinger had done little but rediscover a fragment of what Quinton had already set out in full as the law of thermal constancy. It appears that Schrödinger was unaware of the existence of Quinton's two other laws. One is reminded of a sad comment of the time which stated, against the tide of current thought, that knowledge cannot be acquired by force and that much of knowledge, however important, simply ends up by disappearing from the face of the earth.

P86Modern physics needs to examine Quinton's work before it establishes a firm basis for its concept of entropy. In the words of Napoleon, the mind triumphs over the sword, never mind this emperor's preference of firearms. In fact, ideas are what make the world go round, for better or worse. In order to make sure of the continuation of human history, we must discover whether life is a simple phenomenon in obedience to general process of degradation, or, as Quinton seems to have shown, the reaction to an antagonistic force that in the nineteenth century went under the name of entropy. All our institutions, our different forms of society, our many different political standpoints, even our many forms of religious thought: all are dependant on the understanding of the concept of life in opposition to entropy.

P87                                          Chapter IX

Pasteur, Quinton and biological terrain                                                              

Quinton's unexpectedly early initiation to established science, along with his leap to fame, did little to change the man. I have looked at his unpublished letters – he is no doubt one of the most prolific of those who deserve the description of "man of letters" – and the most we are able to deduce is that his mind, far from dwelling on his success, was fraught with anxiety to carry on with his work. He reacted to the attacks on his theories with a certain ironic detachment, or at times, frank amusement, such as when he referred to the article in the Catalan newspaper that called him a porgy. He was consumed by his enthusiasm and could not let more time go by before getting on with his research.  

Quinton was one of those men who cannot help but become involved: research alone could not satisfy his demand for results. "There is no point to mere genius", he wrote to Jules de Gaultier. "You have the fruit, but you have to take it to market. It is only action that can lead to a true relationship with human beings". Despite his concern to conceal his feelings, Quinton went so far as to declare: "My illness is my love for human beings".  

Quinton had only recently made a stir in the intellectual and political world of his time, when Gustave Le Bon asked him to write a book for his library of scientific philosophy under the auspices of Flammarion, dealing with the implications of the laws of constancy on sociology and politics. Lucien Corpechot, who was present at their conversation, gives us a picture of Quinton's perplexity: he had just said that he had more important duties ahead of him than writing books. Le Bon asked him:  "But what duties?""Saving human lives"."But how?""By opening dispensaries". P88

Le Bon, the sociologist could not resist commenting to his friends that Quinton went too far in his love of paradox. He was amused at Quinton's idea to open dispensaries. So far, Quinton had done little beyond acknowledging his profound concern.  

Right from the beginning of his research, Quinton had predicted    that his marine theory could have only one ultimate purpose: therapeutics. His work was not merely aimed at establishing a new vision of the avatars of cell life in the various forms they had assumed since their origins; his goal was to define a new concept of the organism. The internal environment is a fundamental physiological essential, and the health of the cell depends on the health of this environment: whenever changes occur within it, the cells are weakened and cell function is adversely affected, leading to inefficient organ function. When all is said and done, in spite of the intricacies of its anatomy and physiology, an organism is no more than a culture medium together with the cells living in it.  

In short, as Claude Bernard had said, the cell lives within the animal organism like a fish lives in water; it is immersed literally in an aquarium within the body. But Quinton's work surpasses Bernard's, in that it shows the nature of this internal environment, proving that it is literally seawater, and that ours is a marine aquarium, where colonies of cells go on living in the original conditions of environment.  

Quinton used an image to explain his idea to his friends: a lot of fish swimming happily around in the clear water of an aquarium. As time goes by, the water changes and the fish become more sluggish, their metabolism slows down and they begin to die. But if the water in their aquarium is changed in time, the fish regain their vitality and become lively again.  

Seawater when introduced into the human organism should then play a beneficial role in all cases when the internal environment is polluted for any reason, whether by chemical poisoning, infection by microbes, insufficiency of the excretory organs, diet poor in certain nutrients or any other cause. In short, Quinton here takes a contrary approach to Pasteur. The founder of microbiology had dedicated his life to the research of the microbe, the pathogen. Quinton, taking the general physiological view, which implies that there is health where there is nothing to disturb it, proposes therapy in defense of the organism against the pathogen.  

Now with Pasteur's serological therapy, medicine had the direct means to fight back at the pathogen as it multiplied in the organism. With Quinton's method, the focus was on mobilizing the means for the organism to confront the cause of the disturbance by giving the body the strength to fight and win.

P89Right at the end of his book, Quinton devotes only eight pages to his

therapy, although he had spent much time and effort in experiments at the time the book was published. But his prudence towards established science belies the astonishing nature of his practical experiments. Inflamed with his zeal, Quinton cannot wait to put his flash of insight to the test. Instead of taking the experiment in stages, he takes on what appears to be a hopeless case.  

In a Paris hospital to which Quinton has access, there is a terminal patient with typhoid fever, in terminal coma, and not expected to last out the day. The doctors are happy to leave him to Quinton, who gives the patient a massive intravenous injection of seawater at eleven in the morning, telling the nursing staff that he would be back at six, by which time the patient should have recovered consciousness, asking for water, maybe even for food. They take him for a madman with a mania for seawater.  

The one person Quinton confides in at the time is his wife. Only she knows his state of mind as he makes his way to the hospital that evening. Despite his earlier confidence, as he is about to enter the ward after a climb of two stories, he has a moment of extreme panic at the thought of the loss of face should he have failed. He goes down to the ground floor again and paces up and down, telling himself that he will have to grit his teeth to keep calm when he walks into the ward and finds the fourth bed on the left empty, that he must not show any signs of disappointment and keep a poker face in front of the people who had not believed in miracles.  

Quinton takes a deep breath, goes back up the stairs and opens the door. The typhoid patient, propped up on his pillows is chatting away to one of the nurses! The dying man of the same morning is now on the way to recovery.  

After such a result, Quinton does not hesitate to take on a second case. His patient is a man who has attempted suicide by poisoning himself with oxalic acid. Massive intravenous injections of seawater perform the miracle for a second time.  

Quinton goes on with his experiments which are described in reports dating back to l897 made to the Biological Society, and sets about improving his methods. A professor of the Faculty of Medicine in Bordeaux, Dr. Jolyet

takes a great interest in Quinton's work, proposing to help him by collecting seawater of a suitable nature. His letters describe the difficulties of the medical man turned sailor in his formidable efforts to do the work, in spite of the nature of Quinton's experiments.  

To prepare the injections, Quinton brings seawater to the isotonic state, that is, with the same concentration of salts that exists in the internal environment. He does this in order to be able to eliminate a possible unknown factor in his experiments, despite the inconvenience of having to raise the dosage to be injected by two thirds: the substance requires five parts of distilled water for every two parts of seawater, at least in his first experiments. Being a born biologist, he later goes on to discover whether this mixture might not have an adverse effect on the beneficial properties of seawater. He does this by placing the eggs of sea urchins and leukocytes into the mixture, only to discover that neither can survive in the mixture of seawater and distilled water.  

After several experiments, Quinton finally discovers a liquid that when mixed with seawater will permit the eggs to hatch and the leukocytes to survive: filtered spring water.  

But how will he determine the dosage? At this stage of the experiments, he uses a minimum dose of seven hundred grams for an adult of sixty five kg. The injections are given for five days in succession, then the dose is lowered according to therapeutic needs.  

One of the first doctors to put his faith in Quinton's work gives him a valuable hint. An intern at l'Hôtel-Dieu called Stancouléanu, is working with Vasquez on a case of cirrhosis of the liver, complicated by the appearance of erysipelas. The patient is expected to die the same day, so his doctor resolves to try seawater, and obtains the satisfaction of seeing his patient released from hospital within two weeks. When commenting on the case he makes the observation that instead of injecting intravenously he has applied the injections subcutaneously. Quinton now follows suit and adopts this route, which is safer and easier to manage (It is of interest that a certain Dr. de Bonald had been applying subcutaneous injections of seawater since around 1880, so it is clear that Quinton must have been unaware of this at the time).

P91

Between 1897 and 1904 Quinton applies his marine therapy in the observation of cases in several hospitals in Paris: Saint-Louis, Beaujon, Hôtel-Dieu, Tenon, La Pitié, thanks to the support of chief surgeons such as Tennesson, Duflocq, Vasquez, Klippel, Achard, Brault, Widal, Babinsky, as well as in institutions such as the des Mouleaux asylum near Arcachon, and in health clinics such as de Lalesque and de Festal. Right from the start, Quinton repeats the results of his first two cures in a case of infectious gastroenteritis of unknown etiology and in two cases of syphilis, one a precocious malignant syphilis and the other a chronic condition. In cases of third degree tuberculosis of the lungs, terminal patients are able to obtain great relief from their symptoms for up to a week. Quinton comments moreover that treatment under hospital conditions is the least favorable of procedures for these cases, citing bad diet, promiscuity, disturbed patterns of sleep and obligatory waking hours.

 Quinton takes part in several prolonged experiments with other doctors,

comparing the results obtained through analysis of seawater and normal saline. He is aware that there is a gap between discoveries in biology and in chemistry, and that it is not without reason that he goes to the trouble to obtain seawater at such cost: if he could only use the available laboratory products for his purposes, then he would surely do so, since it would save him a great deal in costs of transport and treatment.

 In October 1905, at a meeting of the Academy of Medicine, Professor

Porak presents a paper on work done at his maternity clinic in their section devoted to the care of debilitated infants, under the supervision of Drs. Macé and Quinton. The study is of over 40 children examined over a period of more than two thousand days of experiments. The results were conclusive: babies who had gained an average of 1.64 grams a day, were now gaining 5.3 grams a day when treated with normal saline solution, and up to 9.7 grams a day when treated with seawater, nearly the double.

The intern Gabriel Lachèze of the hospital of Saint-Joseph chose as the subject of his thesis the comparative studies he had made in several hospitals, and declared with no more ado that the results obtained with seawater were incontestably superior to those obtained with saline. He made use of an image which can still today be considered valid: saline is to seawater what bicarbonate solution is to Vichy mineral water. Lachèze's thesis which was published in 1905 is still significant if we consider that the two solutions were at the time considered to be one and the same substance.

P92Lachèze had opted for seawater in preference over saline solution

because as he explained, seawater was a really live medium. In fact, marine serum is not live once it has been subject to purification and stored in ampoules. The seawater used to make the serum was, in Quinton's time, sterilized by passing it through ceramic filters,* which separated out any live microorganisms, so that the final product could not be considered live, biologically speaking. Quinton showed that the mineral salts present in seawater are in the inorganic, but organized state within the microorganisms that have in a sense removed them from the marine environment. # To obtain marine plasma, all organic living matter must be removed from it so that it will keep. The plasma used in injections is therefore a sterile mineral medium, whose physicochemical composition allows for optimal development of cell life. It acts by making available to the living cell all the mineral fraction it needs in exactly the right proportions, but is not live matter, in the biological sense. 

Quinton spent many years over his method, working with a group of courageous young doctors, and acquiring knowledge in several fields, including practical medicine. Block by block he built up his monumental work that was to cause such a stir in the scientific world, sometimes eliciting curiosity, other times enthusiasm and occasionally even bad feeling. When L'Eau de mer, milieu organique came out in 1904, those few cautious pages written about the therapeutic side of his work were just one facet of the general purpose of his work, but they are given greater significance today, when they are better appreciated in their general context.  

Because of Quinton's book, several eminent men of the medical world began to work with Quinton and to put their signatures to reports sent by him to the Institute. Among these were Potocki, a professor and gynecologist to several hospitals, Variot, chief surgeon of the children's hospital, Macé, chief surgeon of the maternity clinic, Gastou, chief of clinical medicine at the Faculty, Porak, professor and gynecologist at the maternity clinic and Lalesque, professor at Bordeaux and member of the Academy. This was unheard of in the annals of medicine, since Quinton was not even a qualified doctor and was not yet forty years old, at a time when no one in France could be taken seriously before the age of fifty, as Léon Bloy wryly remarked.

P93

By the end of 1906, before engaging in new battles, Quinton could look back on over fifty original published works on his marine method as well as five doctorate theses from several universities.  

As far as his experiments were concerned, Quinton was most impressed with his results on children, especially babies. In the maternity hospital, Potocki and Porak had treated young children suffering from marasmus, a wasting condition caused by poor nutrition and inability to assimilate nutrients, leading to prostration and death. When injected with seawater, these children all revived, sucking greedily at their bottles and putting on weight at a fine rate, literally coming back to the living.  

In July 1906, there was an epidemic of cholera, or toxicosis, with young children as victims. In the Rueil children's hospital, there are eighteen children. For of these were dead within a few hours. Eleven others were gravely ill, losing from 300 to 700 grams in a single night. The lady running the hospital went in desperation to Quinton and returned with marine plasma. Of the eleven children, three were visibly dying, their faces already congested, and a doctor ordered only eight children to be injected. But one of the nurses injected the three dying children against orders, so they were saved along with the others. These children were to come to be known as the 'survivors'.  

Quinton was concerned with the very high infant mortality of the time. Gastroenteritis of the newly born killed 70.000 children each year, and there were frequent epidemics of 'cholera'. The statistics showed that of every two infant deaths, one was from 'cholera', marasmus or some gastrointestinal disease. Quinton knew he had the means to avert catastrophe using his marine method. The birthrate was very low in France at the time. Something had to be done. As he had said to Gustave Le Bon, his first concern was to open dispensaries.

P94Quinton's task would a priori seem to be beyond his capacities as a

scientist devoted to research and experiment, as well as beyond his means. It is here that Quinton reveals another side to his personality: the man of action. He inspires, he persuades, and he knows how to organize.  

On 26 March, 1907 he opens a dispensary near Montparnasse station on Rue de l'Arrivée. It is small and unpretentious, in the middle of high

buildings. It had not changed very much after fifty one years, when a distinguished professor, a minister and a public health official unveiled a commemorative plaque in the building at a time of great social unrest, when France was practically on the eve of an insurrection. 

On the day of the opening of the dispensary Quinton is there to receive the mothers with their children. A long line of people is soon formed at the door, where over 300 injections are given daily. The very poor pay nothing at all; those who have the means pay what they can. So many people keep coming that there is no room for more in the building.  An eminent medical man from Lyons, Jean Jarricot, who was to become one of Quinton's greatest disciples, describes the event in moving terms: 

                                                                                                              "Nothing will ever make me forget those desperate mothers with their dying children in their arms. There was Quinton, silent, reserved but with trembling lips, treating them with love and compassion, his intelligence and faith plainly reflected in his features".

  In December 1907, the marchioness de Mac-Mahon opens a second

dispensary on Rue d'Ouessant, which would receive up to 500 patients daily, children and adults both, since Quinton had not forgotten his first experiments with adults before his focus on child disease.  

The opening of the dispensaries is a major event, not only for the French press, but in newspapers from all over the world. On reading over these articles it is clear that Quinton's marine method has caused a veritable revolution in medicine. He has been compared with Darwin; now he is compared with Pasteur. These articles are marked with a kind of stunned stupefaction, as though a miracle had been performed and people were rubbing their eyes to make sure they were not seeing things.

P95These repercussions in the press, a reflection of public opinion are well

described by Henry de Parville in an in depth article in the Revue des Sciences (Scientific Review). It deserves to be mentioned because it reflects the spirit of the age where science is concerned, and does much to explain the great

enthusiasm of the general public. De Parville is a highly respected scientific writer and director of the magazine La Nature: 

In France no other remedy has caused such a stir as Quinton's isotonic seawater cure. It is fascinating if only from a psychological point of view. Everyone is talking about seawater injections: Quinton's method is discussed in the press; there are conferences on it; he is applauded on the street. There seems to be a general movement that heralds a great discovery that will renew the world. Crowds of people show their enthusiasm in countless ways. Quinton is truly one of mankind's benefactors. He is praised to the skies in the poorer neighborhoods, such is the impact of the almost instantaneous cures of dying children who within hours regain their vitality and are saved".

  The author maintains this tone of wonder even after a long time of

studying Quinton's marine theory and the preparation of the plasma:  

"Here is a common scene enacted in the suburbs of Paris: a mother tells a desperate neighbor, 'Don't fret, your baby will be all right tomorrow. Just take him to Quinton's dispensary'. And in fact that is how it turns out: the next day the child is eating again and has regained its strength. What inspires confidence is the swiftness of the cure. You take a two month baby to the dispensary: it cannot keep its food down, it must surely die. Yet an hour after getting the injection it is no longer vomiting, it takes its bottle and thrives. The cure is practically instantaneous".                                          

P96

To appreciate the scene as described by de Parville, one needs to see the countless photographs that bear witness to these cures in the dispensaries: on the left one sees a photograph of the skeletal shadow of a child surely doomed to die, while on the right, in a photograph taken a month or two later, there is the picture of a normal healthy child, if anything, looking better than most babies of its age.  

How could these results have been taken for anything less than miraculous in the eyes of the public? We are forced to reflect on the ancient collective myth that the ocean is the source of life, a pagan notion that is even now in revival, perhaps because the idea feels instinctively right.

 So it is that within the period of a few weeks, Quinton has gained

immense popularity and public acclaim as a benefactor of humanity. Notes:* Today the plasma is treated by a process of cold micro-filtration at 0.22 micra.            # Quinton mentions a third state, which he calls non-organized organic, a subdivision of the organic state.

René Quinton's Marine Dispensaries

A Clinical History                                                                                                           Fig.1 – diagnosis: marasmus  

First photograph: a baby of 40 days; weight: 2 kg; 55% lower body weight per age than normal; body length: 50cm; the child is skeletal in appearance.  

Second photograph: after two months and twenty seven days of treatment; weight: 3980 grams (an increase of 1980 grams); body length: 54cm; treatment: subcutaneous injections of Quinton's marine plasma; increasing volume of injections from 15 to 30 to 50 cc, 3 to 4 times a week. At the age of 4 months the baby's weight was the same as 10% of normal babies of its age. At 10 months the child had recovered its health; a normal little boy.  From the photograph collection of the dispensary in Lyons 

Fig.2 – diagnosis: infant 'cholera' (summer coliform enteritis)Terminal case – life expectancy: 24 hours                                                              

First photograph: age: 9 months 24 days; weight: 4900gm (normal weight at this age is around 8400 gm); retracted abdominal muscles; paralysis of the eye muscles and facies (spasm of the facial muscles); abdominal cramps; rectal temperature: 39.7C; delay of growth relative to age: 42%; height: 68.7cm (normal height is 70cm); 10 evacuations in one day; feces liquid and expelled under pressure.Treatment: injection (via?) of 500cc a day, in two applications of 250cc each, for 10 days; diet: milk: between 1/8 and 1/10 body weight (?) on the fourth day; feces normal on the seventh day; weight gain: 400 gm in the first 24 h.  

Second photograph: a complete cure. Dr. O. Macé and R. Quinton                                                                                       Fig.3 – diagnosis: Acute infant enteritis. 

Following a history of chronic enteritis, the baby went on to develop a coliform syndrome ('cholera'). One month after treatment, her average weight gain had been 2900gm over three months.            Photo collection of the marine dispensary in Paris  Fig.4- diagnosis: marasmus                              

The three months and ten days old patient had the average weight of a thirteen days old baby, 40% below average for its age. The baby's weight gain in the 100 days since birth had been only 170 gm; weight gain after two months of treatment: 3150gm; the coefficient of hypotrophy was up from 60 to 97.  Photo no. 1037 from Quinton's dispensary of marine therapy in Lyons   Fig.5- diagnosis: infant eczema (impetigo)  A baby of four and a half months; eczema appeared at two and a half months, and does not respond to treatment.                                                                                

First photograph: there is no healthy tissue between the scabs, scales and eruptions. Various forms of treatment have been tried; there is immediate improvement following treatment with Quinton's plasma.

Second photograph: Total cure in nine months, despite interruption of therapy. Improvement after treatment with marine plasma is invariably followed by total cure, despite occasional negligence in continuing therapy.  Photographic collection from the marine dispensary in Paris  Fig.6- diagnosis: eczemaLichenoid eczema of the hands, wrists and neck. 

A man of thirty seven years of age, who has had eczema for the last seven years; occasional improvement has been observed under different methods used in hospitals, but no definite cure. 

First photograph: March 9 (year?): visible improvement after seven injections of marine plasma in small doses (20 to 30cc);                                                                           

Second photograph: April 2 (year?): after seven 40cc injections of plasma: complete cure.  Photographic collection from the marine dispensary in Paris   Fig.7- diagnosis: eczemaImpetiginous eczema of the hands, forearms, elbows and face.                                                                            A woman of fifty; advanced lichenification of lesions. 

First photograph: November 24; treatment: marine method: injections of marine plasma; dosage: 30, 50 and up to 100cc, twice weekly; no other treatment; regression of lesions as from the third injection on and regression of suppuration from lesions as from the fourth injection on.     

Second photograph: December 29, 35 days later; Complete cure. Photographic collection from the marine dispensary in Paris  Fig.8- diagnosis: PsoriasisGeneralized psoriasis First photograph: a young girl of sixteen; lesions advanced; the condition first made its appearance five years ago; during treatment in a hospital, the lesions improved in appearance, but there was no cure.  Second photograph: a year and a half later, when treatment had been interrupted for some time; there is no recidivism. Treatment: Quinton's marine method: injections from 50 to 100, 200 and even 250cc, twice weekly; treatment interrupted after six weeks. Improved appetite; weight gain: 5kg.  Photographic collection from the marine dispensary in Paris  Fig.9- diagnosis: generalized psoriasis  First photograph: a young woman of twenty years; duration of illness: 6 years; no results with previous treatment; there is a slight improvement temporarily with the use of chrysophanic acid. Treatment during ten months with Quinton's plasma, injected in doses of 30, 50, 75, 100, 125 and 200cc twice weekly;  Second photograph: complete cure Photographic collection from the marine dispensary in Paris   Fig.10(?)- diagnosis: hyperchlorhydric dyspepsia (indigestion caused by excess hydrochloric acid in the stomach) with events of enterocolitis with constipation; the young woman of twenty years has terminal cachexia, with phlegmon and mucoid tissue; she has been losing weight progressively over the last five years and has been hospitalized twice with no improvement; vomiting daily for the last two years; amenorrhea (absence of menstruation) for the last four years;  

First photograph: weight: 23kg850Sole treatment: injections of Quinton's plasma in doses of 30, 50 and

75cc three times weekly; total volume injected: 1000cc. From the first injection onward, she is able to drink milk, going on to eggs, vegetables and meat. The constipation clears up after the third injection and she begins to menstruate after 45 days.  Second photograph: two months later; weight: 42kg500; a complete cure: her weight is to go up to 49kg600. Photographic collection from the marine dispensary in Paris  Fig.11- diagnosis: hypotrophy (insufficient growth) owing to chronic gastroenteritis. First photograph: at 6 months and 9 days; weight: 32% below average for his age; Second photograph: 6 months later, the boy is cured.

Third photograph: 25 years after treatment in 1912. ex Dr, Jean Jarricot: "Results of clinical practice in the application of Quinton's marine method in cases of marasmus and infant cholera" : marine cure. First International Congress of marine therapy  Fig.12- diagnosis: marasmus  First photograph: at two and a half months; weight 53% below average for her age  Second photograph: after 7 months of treatment; in two months of treatment the girl was twice as heavy as when she began treatment.  Third photograph: 26 years after treatment in 1911.ex Dr, Jean Jarricot: "Results of clinical practice in the application of Quinton's marine method in cases of marasmus and infant cholera" : marine cure. 

First International Congress of marine therapy  Fig.13- diagnosis: total alopecia (baldness)Use of the marine method in skin problemsProgressive loss of hair, beginning in patches behind the left ear in 1905; treatment in St. Louis hospital from September 1905 to February 1908, using sodium cacodylate, and lotions of ammonia, sulfur and acetic acid, with no results.  First photograph: September 10 1908 , on being admitted to the dispensary. Sole treatment: injections of Quinton's plasma in doses of 50, 70 and 100cc twice weekly.                                        Second photograph: February 18 1909 . Photographic collection from the marine dispensary in Paris Fig.14- the same case First photograph: February 2 1910. The treatment was stopped eight months later.  Second photograph: August 24 1910 . There was no further need of treatment (Obs. R.Quinton). Photographic collection from the marine dispensary in Paris 

P97Chapter X

Repercussions in the Press

Quinton's overwhelming success was not relished by everyone. A newspaper under the harmless title of Le Salut Public was one of the first to spread the venom: "All this enthusiasm for the marine method, all these advertisements in its favor, all this gilded protection on the part of the powers that be, are by no means scientific proof of its validity…The general euphoria cannot be

justified: it can only provide encouragement for Quinton in his belief that the oyster is the true ancestor of the human race." In certain sections of the press, the campaign is masterfully orchestrated, beginning with little touches of malice and manipulation of arguments seasoned with the irony so much appreciated by the French. The gist of it is that marine plasma is a menace. It is claimed that marine plasma used in the treatment of tuberculosis is dangerous in that it causes more fever…with the marine method even a hypochondriac can be cured, providing he has the necessary faith…seawater does not prevent the death of fish from disease…and so on.

Soon there is a more serious accusation: a medical journal publishes the report of two therapists who have used injections of seawater on five children suffering from tuberculosis and on five others with gastroenteritis, or else marasmus. In all of these cases, there was fever, progressive loss of weight and in the case of the patients with tuberculosis, a decline leading to death. Needless to say, the treatment described had nothing in common with Quinton's method.

Then the press latches on to a new topic. In January 1908, Dr. Lavassort writes a letter to the magazine Le Concours Médical. Lavassort is a doctor who is general secretary to a bureau whose function is to prevent the illegal practice of medicine. After devoting much print to denigrating the marine method and spreading the gossip about its perils, the author rebukes Quinton for not having a degree in medicine, citing a law dating from 1892.

P98A certain Dr. Archambault follows suit in an article in Le Journal de Médicine (Journal of Medicine), stating that marine therapy is a fable invented by certain illuminated beings who have lent it their unquestionable authority, but that not even the great are spared the illusion of wisdom, and talent is not always accompanied by good sense. The president of the Society of Medicine in Paris, Dr. Dagnat, declares: 'the therapeutic method in question was not created within the sphere of established medicine. If it is of interest to the general public, this is only because it has been exploited by a press unversed in scientific matters and because there has been great public acclaim for the way the dispensaries have served the needs of the populace.

Despite the posturing of the members of this cabala, and the measures taken by them to frustrate his purposes, Quinton routed them with very little difficulty. He was endowed with a rare force of personality that is invincible when coupled with intelligence and helped along by a bit of luck. This quality is brought out in full force when we read the last sentences of an article written by Julien de Lagonde, a journalist from Toulouse, who at the time was paying a visit to the dispensary on Rue de L'Arrivée in Paris:

"When I was about to leave, Quinton told me: 'You have a pen there. Well, I am making you responsible as of this moment for all the tears shed by the mothers of their children, for all the distress suffered by children who have lost their mothers, because of what these people are being deprived of, as a direct result of your silence and your lack of courage. Go out there and make an appeal to your public and tell them what they have to know to help me get on with my work."

This has evidently been polished up a little for the benefit of the public, but it gives us a good picture of the way Quinton could appeal to people's better feelings.

P99As soon as de Lagonde  returned  to Toulouse , he launched a fund-raising campaign through L'Express du Midi . His struggle was to last three long years in the face of countless difficulties: he was accused of having a vested interest in the commercialization of seawater and there was much speculation about how much of the loot was going into his pocket. However, in 1912 he managed to open a marine dispensary on the Rue de la Châine which immediately drew multitudes of patients seeking treatment. De Lagonde, quoting one of the directors of the Faculty of Medicine in Toulouse, wrote:

"From the day the dispensary was opened, there have been no setbacks or problems of any kind. We have saved young children with marasmus right from the start of treatment; those suffering from chronic eczema and gastroenteritis have obtained relief from their symptoms before going on to a complete cure, and twenty patients are on the way to recovering their health. What is more, this has happened in just under a month. Sneer all you will, be sarcastic and ironical to your heart's content: I don't care. To get this project to work, I will devote every ounce of my energy and fight for the cause with all my heart and soul!”

In France , several doctors opened other dispensaries with considerably less difficulty than in Toulouse . The most important dispensary was in Lyon, run by Dr. Jean Jarricot who henceforth would be working with the marine method, going so far as to write a veritable compendium of the method, of which more will be said later. There were marine dispensaries in Elbeuf, Nancy, Dunkerque, Pont-à-Mousson, Brest, Reims , Commercy, Saint-Denis, Dugny and Creil. Apart from the dispensaries there were services provided for the application of injections by departments in hospitals such as the Charité Maternelle, the Mutualité Maternelle and the Nouvelle Étoile, three of the most important hospitals when it came to questions of public health, and where private initiative flourished, and in many other hospitals besides.

P100At this stage, we might make a slight digression. Quinton had already, on two occasions, made a tremendous stir in the world at large, first when his book came out and then again on his success with marine therapy. But in France, apart from his fame in the realms of the ocean, he was also a well known and prophetic figure in the world of aviation.

At the turn of the century, Quinton once again shows us the quality of his visionary genius in this letter he wrote his friend Corpechot:

"We will surely bear witness to great marvels. Man will not only be able to cause machines heavier than air to become airborne: he will accomplish this feat without the use of a motor, with a simple sail". Some time later, Quinton was made the butt of jokers when he declared that it would someday be possible to take an airplane to Tokyo just to have a cup of tea. But in 1908, Santos Dumont and the Wright brothers had already taken flight, never mind the distance covered. This unprecedented feat was received with tremendous enthusiasm, but very few people seemed to be aware of the practical applications of being airborne, judging from the press of the time. Quinton is not impressed with people's opinions: he knows he is in the right. A man of his mental scope could only regard the conquest of air as yet another logical development in the broader concept of life that had always guided his actions.

Once again, fate appears to have been against Quinton: for there is very little mention of him in the literature of aviation. Only one publication, Les Ailes (Wings), gives him the credit due for his role as a pioneer of aviation.

Quinton went on to found the National Air League, of which he was president, doing much to persuade an entire elite of builders and aviators to launch several campaigns for public support. Among the many texts of the time available on the subject, we might quote the testimony of a great fan of aviation, Colonel Renard, with whom Quinton had established the first association of French aviators:

"I will never forget the thrill of those heroic times in the history of aviation. For those who were not present it is hard to appreciate the importance of René Quinton in its development. There was no amount of bureaucracy that could discourage him, whether from parliament, public organs or investors. He would make a point of talking to everyone and steering them in the direction he wanted". Renard goes on to make a point that reveals the character of Quinton and shows how he could succeed in so many fields: "Whenever a committee was set up by the League, there was no question of holding elections: Quinton would allocate tasks to specific people; when he said 'Go", they would go ahead and do it. He never once needed to manipulate the voting: everyone would do his bidding, because they all knew that whatever he said was the right thing to do".

P101Some of the more progressive minds of the time were able to assimilate Quinton's way of thinking, creating a link between his studies of the marine environment and his work as a pioneer in aviation. The following poem written by Dr, Arnulphy is of interest not because it claims any literary pretensions, but because it expresses so well the essential spirit of Quinton:  

Organic life emerges from desireFrom ocean depths our souls take wingDreaming of flight, to realms of air we aspireBorn from the sea, Man would of sky be king.

Another race, its beauty still unfurledWill come to bloom, a flower set apartWarm blooded, light boned like a birdGift of the gods, a hidden treasure of the heart.

Then forged will be the destiny of our raceThese nerves of steel, these sinews, towers of strengthThe bird in man flies onward into space

To unfold the secrets of the world at length.

A new device will now replace the oldA rhythmic force akin to human breathIn shadow waits, its aim to holdAvian man from his descent toward death.

And when on earth, this dying globeDoes reign supreme the icy cold of deathThen may the victory of hopeGrant to our wings a final surge of strength!

It was none other than Dr. Arnulphy who was to introduce the marine method to the American medical world of the time. In 1911 he attended several conferences in the States, at universities and with medical associations, in which the press reported that "his conclusions were met with an unconditional standing ovation". American hospitals, among them the Boston Children's Hospital began to use the marine method from France.

P102Quinton's work was greeted with great alacrity in several other countries. There were marine dispensaries in Italy , Switzerland, Belgium, Holland and Algeria.

In England, the dispensaries were patronized by Princess Helen, sister of Edward VII, and aunt of George V and William II. She paid a visit to Paris in 1912 to look over Quinton's dispensaries and learn more of the method so as to be able to found a dispensary in London. She was accompanied on this visit by Burford and Sandberg, directors of two London hospitals. After thorough inquiry into the method, she declared on her arrival back to London:

"I can see there is now a powerful weapon in our hands to help in the fight against the plagues that threaten so many human lives. Quinton's method has in one year saved the lives of hundreds of children in London ". Quinton was particularly keen to try the marine method in Egypt. The infant mortality in the summer in this country was amazingly high. In Cairo, in the winter, there was an average of 80 infant deaths per week, while in the summer this number could go up to as many as 700, 800, sometimes 900 children per week. Doctors in Egypt, the society for the protection of children

and the governor, Lord Kitchener appealed to Quinton to make a study of the local conditions. Quinton paid several visits to Egypt in the company of his greatest collaborator, Marguerite Dreyfus, who is now 91 and remembers him well.

In June 1912, the Egyptian press reported on Quinton's conferences and his work in Journal du Caire, making the point that he had come to Egypt in the summer when most people will do anything to avoid it:

"When you come to take your leave of the Nile Valley, to spread the benefits of your method under different skies, you may be sure, Sr. Quinton, that you will leave behind you our undying memory and gratitude for the fruits of your labors".

P103Enthusiasm was rife, and was often expressed in the style of oriental poetry. In the words of Chefik Pasha:

"May I be permitted to add my voice to the hymns of praise sung by those in honor of this learned magus who has come to relieve mothers of the plagues that assail them, and restore harmony to their families. All our talk is of the hero whose passage among us, unlike that of a conqueror, brings us the seeds of peace for us to sow!"

On his return to France, Quinton is kept busy with innumerable problems arisen with the development of French aviation. It is keenly felt that war is imminent, and his patriotism leads him farther in this direction. But he does not wholly abandon his therapy. His aim is to prevent farther attacks on his method, whose merit deserves recognition. At the end of 1913, he persuades the minister of the interior to exert influence on the Academy of Medicine, compiling all the information of Quinton's research and that of other doctors since the first applications of the therapy. A formal petition is drawn up to nominate a scientific commission to look into the subject in greater depth and check on the statistics of the results.

In short, let the writing in the press speak for itself. Georges Grappe in Médicine writes:

"There is no doubt that the name of Mr. René Quinton is one of the most popular in our times. He has freely risen with the greatest ease to the heights of glory. The most illustrious of our doctors, the greatest philosopher since

Pascal that France can be proud of (Bergson)…all confirm the great originality of Quinton's theories and the profound significance of his method...in short, even the general public, who as a rule does not take much part in the intellectual world, has come to recognize his importance and bless him as the inventor of marine plasma. The Law of Constancy will yet be called Quinton's Law by future generations...Quinton's discovery has opened vast horizons in the search for the mysteries of the science of life. In the dark forest where our origins lie hidden, Quinton has shed light on the innumerable paths leading toward new horizons. He has obtained so many results in so many different fields, and has been recognized for the man he is by the most brilliant scientific men of our times. René Quinton deserves his place among the greatest creative thinkers of the new age".

Be as it may, Grappe's accolade must be seen in the context of the following text written by Dr. Jules Gallabardin for Le propagateur de l'homéopathie:

"Two distinct currents of thought made their appearance when Quinton's work was first published. Some doctors, who were inspired by the logical certainty of improvements in therapy, began immediately to apply it in practice. On the other hand, in circles where there was reluctance on the side of the powers that be to accept innovations which could rock the boat of conventional academics, his ideas met with downright hostility; to add insult to injury, here was a man without a medical degree meddling in medical matters. Is it not true that Pasteur also faced and overcame the very same kind of trials? In some segments of the scientific world, Quinton's work has been denied to be of scientific importance: the medical profession has simply turned its back on him". Quinton was very well aware of this balance of power. He was backed by the French elite, by the medical world and by public opinion. Those who were against him had some other interest at stake, or perhaps it was a case of sheer ignorance, apathy and inertia: in short, all the stultifying and mind-deadening factors working in favor of chaos and creating an atmosphere of plotting and intrigue, as had also been the case with Pasteur.

P105The game was in stalemate, and Quinton was no David confronting Goliath. The intervention on the part of the minister of the interior that he had just obtained was only the first victory in a series of battles in a war he was determined to win. But in the meantime, another war had been declared on

August 2, 1914 and Quinton was called to arms. He was by now 48 years old, and legally exempt from military service and had he wanted to do so, could have brought his popularity to bear in order to remain a civilian. But the human being took the upper hand of the scientist, at least in the beginning. René Quinton made for the battlefront where he remained four years as a soldier of the lowest rank.

 P107Chapter XI

Marine dispensaries:Clinical practice

It is likely that the world of medicine has always been divided in two distinct ways of thinking. The first approach is to the symptoms and points to diagnosis of the target organ that is affected by the disease; this means that an effort is made to fight the disease with direct methods of attack. The second approach regards disease as a localized expression of a state of general imbalance of the organism; this means that it is preferable to tackle the underlying causes before going on to use methods to fight the disease.

Pasteur's ideas at first encountered a great deal of opposition, but his work was soon accepted by the establishment. He took first place in the evolution of medicine, at least for a time.

Quinton was one of the first to acknowledge Pasteur's genius. This can be seen in a letter in 1900 to a friend who was a critic of Pasteur:

"When you find yourself face to face with an indisputably superior mind, you cannot condemn it: you must trace the path of this mind and see how it leads to its judgments. A man like Pasteur is like a treasure: he is devoted to his task of exploring a great number of important phenomena in a precise and disinterested manner. He is not a dreamer, nor a blind theoretician, shut up in a prison cell informing us dogmatically of the configuration and color of the Atlantes. Pasteur has analyzed infinitely complex phenomena; he has overcome and tamed the invisible; he has dominated all kinds of living processes and brought one of the greatest theories of humanity out of virtual

chaos. After throwing his light on one of the most complicated trees in the forest of the world, Pasteur is no more than a man who does not believe he has got to the bottom of everything".

P108So there is nothing anti-Pasteur about Quinton: in fact his contemporaries recognized that the two scientists complemented each other's work. To take an example from the press, in 1907, the editor of L'Intransigeant wrote: Pasteur's work gives us a concept of disease; Quinton's work gives us a concept of health...What is Pasteur's serum? The serum of a specific disease, that attacks a certain microbe and no other. What is seawater? A kind of serum which does not attack any specific organism, but which gives the organic cell the means to fight against any microbe".  A Dr. Robert Simon writes:  " Pasteur's sera are specific to a certain disease: they act against one microbe alone and its toxins .Quinton's work shows how seawater is also a kind of serum: not against any particular microorganism, but as an aid to the cell. Clinical practice has confirmed this: in all cases where there is alteration to the cells, there has been recovery after injections with seawater".   More recently, Dr. Jean Jarricot has declared that if we examine Quinton's concept and its impact on the evolution of human thought, we must conclude that his marine theory is just as important as the work of Pasteur.  Be as it may, the viewpoints of the two scientists, although complementary, remain in diametric opposition one to the other. In fact, Pasteur maintains his focus on the pathogens responsible for disease, while Quinton is more concerned with the notion of biological terrain. It may be useful at this stage to examine the concept of terrain, by quoting the definition given in Larousse:  "Organic terrain in biology: the total amount of mineral substances that make up the medium that nurtures the cells as if they were plants rooted in the earth, together with the relative difficulty or ease they offer pathogenic microorganisms in their efforts to establish themselves in the organism".

P109

It may be of use to expand on this by saying that when the biological terrain is in a state of imbalance, it makes it easier for pathogenic germs to develop, opening a pathway for their installation, thereby causing functional alterations and encouraging the development of chronic non-infectious diseases.  Also we should make a distinction, in talking of terrain, between terrain in the sense of internal environment, common to all vertebrates, containing all trace elements in the right proportion, and terrain in terms of the specific characteristics of this environment which will vary according to the needs of the kind of organism involved. Quinton showed us that the internal environment, the primordial terrain or liquid matrix is identical to seawater. When this is disturbed in any way, it leaves the cell an easy prey to disease. The marine method aims to renew to some extent this internal environment, by replenishing it with injections of seawater which restore it to its original composition.  The nature and the scope of this concept had been fairly well understood by Quinton's contemporaries. On reading texts from the press, there are frequent references made to the connection between Quinton's work and Claude Bernard's. The idea of therapy is to aim at the renewal, or rejuvenation of the internal environment. Certain authors have declared with reason that the scope of the application of the marine method is virtually unlimited, since its target is the culture medium of the cell, and where equilibrium is the key to normal function, while disturbance of equilibrium creates immediate repercussions.  The following are quotations from two doctors, and are rather well expressed. The first is from a 1911 conference in Annonay by a Dr. Plantier, who came to this conclusion: "For every imaginable reason, I implore you to use Quinton's method whenever possible. There is an immense field to be exploited where much has yet to be discovered, in this simple therapy, free of risk, practical and efficacious, and which can only be developed much farther in time...Observations made up to now have given reason for us to believe that this discovery of genius on the part of Quinton will open vast horizons in terms of therapy..."

p110

Dr. Robert Simon, in his notable book, Therapeutic Applications of Seawater, published in 1907, lists the applications in first aid of the marine method, which he himself had used, and comes to the following conclusion:  "In spite of its deceptive simplicity (and, I can state with great satisfaction, perhaps because of it), I can see no paradox in comparing marine plasma directly with the liquid environment of the organic cell. (The method) provides us with the means to restore to the cells their lost or diminished vitality, in order to renew the trace minerals in their culture medium which has been adulterated in some way. These mineral salts help to reconstitute the internal environment. As it is only three years after the first experiments, there is no way to predict the limits of this therapy...The use of the method in the treatment of sciatica, gout, rheumatism and whooping cough leads us to believe that Quinton's marine injections are to become one of the most important forms of therapy in the field of practical medicine".

P111While writing this book, I have come across several passages that have led me to further speculation. While dealing with such themes, a writer must be content to be the mere transmitter of facts. He must never give way to his personal bias: such an attitude cannot lead to certainty. It is in this spirit that I devoured countless learned works, including medical theses, reams of correspondence and hundreds of articles devoted to an infinite variety of successful experiments with Quinton's marine method in all its aspects.  The broader definitions I have just traced are simple, clear and very easy to understand, so it can only be ignorance that is responsible for some of the comments made to me recently: injections of marine plasma are dusty and ancient as therapy, and have been superceded by newer and better medication. This is the same as trying to claim that there is no longer any need for air or food. The ocean and mankind have not changed since Quinton, not even since Plato who had said that "seawater is the cure for all diseases" You cannot call a force of nature a remedy, using the pretext that it is being used in therapy: such thinking is a sign of false, or at least falsified, judgment. What are the main applications of René Quinton's marine method using injections of isotonic seawater?  Any list of its applications will always show a great many gaps, as it was not feasible to draw up a full inventory of the whole treasure trove of as yet

unpublished work, so we must be content to refer to medical bibliography of before 1914.  At the time, Quinton had laid aside his personal research to devote his energies to developments in aviation, but his method and its applications were going strong. His bibliography in France, though incomplete, included eight doctoral theses in medicine and about a hundred or so important and original reports.  All his work now needs to be reconsidered, studied and developed farther, using the means available to modern science. Another question is that of dosage. At the time, Quinton and his collaborators had been using massive doses of 500, 600 and even 700cc in one injection. What really strikes us are the sensational results obtained with young babies. In treating infant cholera, for example, a baby would receive a 200g injection in the morning and another in the afternoon for 10 consecutive days, after which time the dose would be lowered to 200g a day for the next eight days.

P112In other words, a tiny body weighing a mere three kilograms, and whose internal environment was the equivalent of more or less two liters, was receiving, over a period of 18 days of injections, a dose of 5.5 liters of plasma, the equivalent of two and a half times the volume of what was its original internal environment.  In adults, the injections were reduced to an amount of about 100 grams twice weekly for three months, which added up to around four kg of liquid per body weight of 60kg, with an internal environment of around 40 kg.  So it is clear that there was an enormous difference between the relative quantity of plasma injected into a child and into an adult, which would explain the fantastic results obtained in the case of small children. These apparently miraculous cures were thus misleading, to say the least. Even today, the use of marine plasma is almost always restricted to the treatment of infants.  On the other hand it cannot be denied that in the case of diseases in small children, the marine method had been very well described in great detail and from a wide range of references to experiments, all of them extremely well documented. This was the direct result of setting up marine dispensaries and

other hospital services that were using injections of seawater on children. We owe this more than anything to the work of Dr. Jean Jarricot, who in 1913 while still in practice founded the marine dispensary in Lyon. In 1921, he published a book, Le dispensaire marine, un organisme nouveau de puériculture ( the marine dispensary, a new entity in pediatrics ), which was a true compendium and which he dedicated to Quinton. It was a sizeable volume, illustrated with quality photographs and a great number of graphs and other statistics, really well balanced in judgment and based on experiments done over a period of ten years, with excellent results.  Dr. Jarricot does no omit to stress the fact that even if we restrict our judgment to the narrower field of small children, marine plasma has an "unlimited sphere of action in the treatment of several kinds of pathology".

P113Having already predicted how this affirmation would be received, Jarricot adds: "I can recognize that the marine method is easily poked fun at by those who wish to judge the facts through pure reason, as though experimentation did not exist. This mindset is the one that for a long time demonstrated that the blood does not circulate. It is the mind set of those who put obstacles in front of Pasteur and the new directives of biology. These people regard seawater as just another remedy and have no idea of the vast sphere of action of this particular remedy, refusing a priori to believe the facts and results in front of their very noses".  The author, who shows the courage of his convictions in his numerous books, goes so far as to explain the reasons behind the opposition to the marine method. His notion was that the human mind finds it hard to be receptive to new truths, as history shows, very recently in the case of Pasteur. A great discovery is always met with reluctance since it turns things upside down and causes havoc with countless routine matters.  Jarricot reasons that there is a connection between the length of time spent in the struggle, the importance of the new discovery, the violence of the opposition and the degree of amazement at the time of the innovation. It is certainly true that Quinton is much more like us than like his contemporaries. What keeps him up to date is that he has evolved the instinct that leads people

towards an interest in nature, which has been made much easier with the developments of research into marine resources, together with advances in electronic equipment.  Jarricot's book shows us that the marine method and its application needs to be studied at great depth, and that failure in therapy occurred where there was carelessness in the application of the injections. He analyzes these cases in every detail. One such case was that of Simon and Pater, who announced in Presse Médicale, in 1905, their report on an experiment with six children suffering from tuberculosis, where the results were poor or worse; each patient had received an average of three injections only, in ridiculous doses: 5grams of seawater per injection. No comment was Jarricot's reaction to this, because the experiment had nothing at all to do with the marine method. So anyone using the marine method should know something about its development. Here is a relevant passage:

P114"Naturally, one cannot just use the marine method by injecting any random dose of seawater. The method has long been out of the phase of proof through experiment. The success of the method must depend on basic and rigorous rules that have evolved over time. We cannot be guided by fantasy, as many people have learnt to their cost. The quantity to be injected varies enormously according to the purpose, how often and how long treatment should be continued, the use of seawater in baths to reduce fever in children, its use as an anti-emetic, the diet and appetite of the patient, - all these factors were taken into account in the setting up of Quinton's established rules, which make the marine method a very well defined therapy. It is no exaggeration to say that those who criticize the method should first put their minds to get to know it better".   To know the method is to submit to the evidence as described by Jean Jarricot and many other doctors who were witness to its amazing efficacy.  The general rule observed was that one hour after a first injection a child at death's door that vomited everything that was fed would be able to take a bottle of water, and after yet another hour, would accept a bottle of formula. In most cases the digestive system would return to normal so quickly that the child would gain as much as 500 g in a mere 24 hours. Water is restored to the system as fast as it was being lost just before. Less than two hours after

the application of the injection of seawater, the child's features would lose their deathly appearance and regain all the signs of health.  There is no need of lengthy explanation of the exact procedures laid down by Quinton in the details of the application of his marine method. These were relevant only to the doctors in Paris, who had at their fingertips a real documentary treasure of photographs and observations to be consulted whenever necessary. This was available at the marine dispensary at number four, Rue de l'Arrivé. It now belongs to the Quinton family and is in the hands of Quinton International Laboratories in Almoradi (Alicanti).  The method was used in children mainly for the treatment of coliform enteritis or toxicosis, gastrointestinal diseases, intolerance to milk, hypotrophy and marasmus, syphilis and eczema. Today, most of these diseases have been eradicated, in the first world at least, but this does not mean that the marine method is any less useful in the treatment of diseases in children.

P115Following Quinton's inspiration and in close collaboration with him, it was Dr. Arnulphy who drew the first lines for prenatal treatment, of equal importance for mother and child. His ideas were taken from some of Quinton's unpublished work, and they reveal yet another facet of the great man's perspicacity, originality and genius. According to the theories of Broca, the cephalic index of each person remains unchanged from his birth to his death. The cephalic index measures the proportion between the maximum transverse and antero-posterior diameters of the skull, that is, the depth and breadth respectively of the skull. According to Quinton's general conception, the basis of his work, Broca's theory was untenable.  At the time of Quinton's death in 1925, his conclusions were due to be published, concerning years of careful study and measurement of thousands of skulls of children and their parents. This work had been carried out in the marine dispensaries, in Macé's health clinic for the newborn in Hôtel-Dieu, and in the colonial exhibition in Marseilles of children of African and Asian origin. Quinton was able to prove that Broca had been mistaken. Children are born with a cephalic index of around 77, whatever the index of their parents, which means that the important factor is species, not race. Race is only

differentiated after a few months, when the child acquires its permanent cephalic index. Even so, Quinton pointed out that the nasal index of a newborn baby is invariably 100, later diminishing to around 90, 80 and 70 in Europoid people, or else increasing to as much as 120 in certain Africans. In the same way, kinky hair is an acquired characteristic, since African children are born with straight hair.  Quinton went on to establish a relationship between this anthropological data and the probable benefits of prenatal care. Before its birth, the child is subject to physiological laws that rule our species, and race is a negligible factor. Going farther, Quinton believed that it was possible to eliminate the more recent characteristics of immediate heredity, so that it should be possible to treat a fetus indirectly through its mother, and thereby eliminate defects passed on by its forebears.  In any case, his experiments with injections of seawater in prenatal treatment were able to give much food for thought.

P116Some time before, Arnulphy, Macé and Quinton had made experiments on several pregnant women, with at least five pregnancies behind them. Of these pregnancies, 28% were premature births, 14% intra-uterine deaths and as many as 59% deaths before the age of one year: all indicate serious defects. After prenatal treatment with injections, these percentages were found to drop to zero in these women.  After founding, in Nice, a league for prenatal marine treatment, Dr. Arnulphy went over the results he had obtained. The treatment was given to women whose previous pregnancies had been abnormal to some degree, and for the most part resulted in normal fetal development, indicated by higher birth weight than the average in these children. There were few cases of atrophy and marasmus, and finally, the treatment had such an effect on the original defects that anatomical anomalies resulting from hereditary factors tended to diminish, if not disappear completely.  In this way, partial or total victory was the general rule in the case of congenital syphilis and hereditary predisposition to tuberculosis. Prenatal marine treatment need not be restricted to pathological cases. It is of great benefit to women whose pregnancies are problematic for whatever

reasons: listlessness, nervous instability, loss of weight and malnutrition, for example. There is no need to carry this argument much farther, if we reflect that in this day and age, prenatal treatment could be a valuable aid to all pregnant women and their babies. I know of experiments with domestic animals that obtained splendid results, especially when these were compared with other animals of the same breed and in the same environment that were not given treatment.  Apart from its use in prenatal treatment, Quinton's marine method has been applied in long term experiments on tuberculosis of the lungs, digestive problems, dermatological problems, gynecological illnesses, mental illness, neuroses, acute poisoning, debility, insomnia, severe hemorrhage and senility.