Erik L. Peterson - The Life Organic: The Theoretical Biology Club and the Roots of Epigenetics

N ew Yorkers had been anticipating his visit for months. At Columbia University, where French intellectual Henri Bergson (18591941) was to give twelve lectures in February 1913, expectations were especially high. When first approached by officials at Columbia, he had asked for a small seminar room where he could directly interact with students and facultysomething that fit both his personality and his speaking style. But Columbia sensed a potential spectacle. They instead put him in the three-hundred-plus-seat lecture theater in Havemeyer Hall. That much attention, Bergson insisted, would make him too nervous to speak in English without notes. Columbia persisted. So, because rhetorical presentation was as important to him as the words themselves, Bergson delivered his first American lecture entirely in French.

That was only a prelude. Bergsons Free Will versus Determinism lecture on Tuesday, February 4thonce again delivered in his barely audible Frenchcaused the academic equivalent of a riot. Two thousand people attempted to cram themselves into Havemeyer. Hundreds of hopeful New Yorkers were denied access; long queues of the disappointed snaked around the building and lingered in the slush. According to legend, motorists on Broadway slowed to a standstill to observe the spectacle. Between the goose-necking Though the traffic did not become a problem again, this level of overcrowding continued through nearly all of his Columbia University lectures. Bergson clearly touched a nerve in New York. He had nearly everywhere he spoke.

He claimed, self-deprecatingly, to have no well-articulated philosophical system, nothing to champion, no reason for his audiences to be this large, this engaged. His supporters in Europe and North America knew better. Bergson was a philosopher, of course, but his brand of philosophy felt fresh and new, not just a rehashing of Kant or Aristotle. Some called it vitalism . Living things, Bergson believed, possessed an lan vital, some animating force or spirit irreducible to mere chemistry or physics. Organisms, and by extension humans, were not mere automatons; according to Bergson, we were special. It was Bergsons notion of organic specialnessand the individualistic self-determination that seemed to come with the vitalismthat resonated with audiences in the early twentieth century.

Yet the ideas that motivated Bergson and drew his crowds were not originally his ideas at all. Two decades earlier, in Naples, Italy, a young German named Hans Driesch (18671941) squinted through his microscope at a developing sea urchin embryo. It had just divided: one egg into two gelatinous cells. He had decided to repeat an earlier experiment done by Drieschs well-known mentor, Wilhelm Roux. Roux had used frogs eggs and had lanced one of the two developing cells with a hot needle, killing it. The second cell from that egg lived and continued to grow and divide, but it formed only half a tadpole. This result made sense to Roux. Any complex system that lost half of itself would, at best, form only halfway. But Driesch saw something else there, and he altered the experiment. Instead of killing one cell with a needle, he painstakingly teased the two cells apart, making them float alone. After several trials, the floating cells, separated from their other halves, grew not into half sea urchins, but full ones with all of their parts in their right places. What kind of machine, Driesch wondered, could lose half of itself yet continue to develop into a whole, functioning system? Only a living thing had the ability to do this. So, he thought, living things must be exceptional, crucially different from nonliving things, and this insight led Driesch to vitalism.