Perspectives in Biology and Medicine

PERSPECTIVES IN BIOLOGY AND MEDICINE Volume 28 · Number 2 ¦ Winter 1985 HEMOGLOBIN IN MAMMAUAN OXYGEN TRANSPORT: INGENIOUS FORMULATIONS NOT QUITE IN ACCORD WITH NATURE MARK D. ALTSCHULE* Introduction SamuelJohnson once remarked that time alone can establish the value of works that are not "raised upon principles demonstrable and scientifick" but owe their appeal "wholly to observation and experience." This comment offers an explanation for the haste with which many medical professors and some biologists for centuries have tried to validate observations made in nature by recourse to whatever scientific notions were current. In the seventeenth century, these notions were iatromathematics and iatrochemistry; in the nineteenth century, they were fragmentary physics of the reductionist Berlin group; and in the twentieth century, they may be some aspects of molecular biology. (Galen's humoral system and the derived pseudochemistry of Paracelsus are too blatantly nonsensical to require discussion here.)Johnson's dichotomous dictum may not be applicable to the life sciences because the "principles demonstrable and scientifick" themselves were developed in the laboratory on the basis of "observation and experience" in Nature. These considerations raise several questions. One is: At what point in their accumulation do observations of Nature need to be validated by laboratory science? Can observations of Nature be accepted as convincing even though totally unexplainable by current scientific concepts, ?Francis A. Countway Library ofMedicine, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 021 15.© 1985 by The University of Chicago. AU rights reserved. 003 1-5982/85/2802-042 1$0 1 .00 Perspectives in Biology andMediane, 28, 2 · Winter 1985 | 175 either true or false? These and related questions arise and may be answered by a history of the ideas about oxygen, beginning centuries before oxygen was even discovered. The ancients were convinced that the ambient atmosphere contained a Vivifying Principle, or several of them. In some early systems of thought this Vivifying Principle was believed to be divine: the Divine Breath or Spirit, the Logos, the World Mind, the World Soul, etc. (Today 's psychoanalysts do not recognize the connection of their Collective Unconscious to this primitive hypothetical entity.) The ancients believed that, when Man breathed in air, he inhaled with it some of the Divine Spirit. He might breathe some ofit out upon a loved one, as in the sniffkiss of primitive people, or more specifically in acts such ás described in John 20:22: "He [Jesus] breathed on them, and saith unto them, Receive the Holy Ghost." To this day, Egyptian Catholic (Coptic) priests, after baptizing infants, confirm them by breathing in their faces, saying "Receive the Holy Ghost." Similarly, during the ordination of a Coptic bishop, the other bishops present breathe in the prelate's face. Religious and philosophical ideas about the divine aspects of ambient air held during the past 2,000 years have been discussed elsewhere [I]. The widely accepted system of ideas about the creative atmospheric principle involved not Only theology and philosophy but other aspects of thoughtas well. For example, the atomist Democritus opined that the air we inhaled contained only particles of the Divinely Vivifying Principle, suggesting that it had other components as well. Other thinkers maintained that only a portion of the ambient air—an exquisitely refined component called aether—acted as this Principle. Here then was a system of ideas based neither on "principles demonstrable and scientifick" nor on "observation and experience." Despite this, or perhaps because of it, the system stood unshakable for centuries. Biological concepts were also brought forward from earliest times. It will be recalled that Aristotle, in his Parts ofAnimals, wrote "Some maintain that the Soul of an animal is Fire or some such substance. This is a crude way of putting it; and might be improved upon by saying that the Soul subsists in some body of a fiery nature. The reason for this is that the hot substance is the most serviceable of all for the activities of the soul." It is important to note that early ideas about the Vivifying Principle brought in analogies between combustion and respiration, and these views persisted for centuries. The seventeenth century saw a great increase in writing about respiration . One of the authorities, Richard Lower, made a most...