Mitogenetic Rays

Well, let's go on. About 1923, there was a whole series of papers by Gurwitech and others. There were hundreds of them published on mitogenetic rays.(8) There are still a few of them being published. I don't know how many of you have ever heard of mitogenetic rays. They are rays that are given off by growing plants, living things, and they were proved, according to Gurwitsch, that they were something that would go through quartz but not through glass. They seemed to be some sort of ultraviolet light.

The way they studied these was this. You had some onion roots- -onions growing in the dark or in the light and the roots will grow straight down. Now if you had another onion root nearby, and this onion root was growing down through a tube or something, going straight down, and another onion root came nearby, this would develop so that there were more cells on one side than the other. One of the tests they had made at first was that this root would bend away. And as it grew this would change in direction which was evidence that something had traveled from one onion root to the other. And if you had a piece of quartz in between it would do it, but if you put glass in between it wouldn't. So this radiation would not go through glass but it would go through quartz.

Well, it started in that way. (p.6) Then everything gave off mitogenetic rays, anything that remotely had anything to do with living things. And then they started to use photoelectric cells to check it and whatever they did they practically always found that if you got the conditions just right, you could just detect it and prove it. But if you looked over those photographic plates that showed this ultraviolet light you found that the amount of light was not much bigger than the natural particles of the photographic plate so that people could have different opinions as to whether it did or didn't show this effect and the result was that less than half of the people who tried to repeat these experiments got any confirmation of it; and so it went. Well, I'll go on before I get too far along.