2

Radium and the Origin of Life

In 1905 the world at large first learned of an epoch-making discovery from blaring double-columned headlines on the front page of the London Daily Chronicle:

Word of Burke’s discovery crossed the pond almost instantaneously and hit the front page of the New York Times with an equally sensational effect: “Generation by Radium: Cambridge Professor Reported to Have Produced Artificial Life.” Burke seemed to have discovered the means of creating life at will in the laboratory. As a Times headline asked three weeks later, “Has Radium Revealed the Secret of Life? Recent Investigations Held by Some to Justify Such a Belief.”2 For its part, the Daily Chronicle repeated Burke’s suggestion that the strange forms he had discovered were “in the critical state of matter between the mineral and the vegetable, in fact, on the borderline between the living and the dead.”3 The New York Times breathlessly declared that the “new creatures” stood “on the frontiers of life, where they tremble between the inertia of inanimate existence and the strange throb of incipient vitality.”4 Neither radium nor microbe, but partaking of some of the properties of both, Burke thus christened his newfound growths radiobes.5

Burke, like Soddy, was working out his own distinctive synthesis of the realms of the radioactive and the living. While Soddy’s focus had been on the characterization of radioactive phenomena by means of biological metaphors, Burke took Soddy’s metaphysics of metaphor one step further. Where Soddy had posited a process of natural selection among radioactive “metabolons,” Burke posited an even more provocative theory of “physical metabolism” spanning the cosmic and organic worlds. Burke’s radiobes thus soldered together a narrative of evolution that extended from the vast reaches of nebulae in outer space to the very origin of life itself, linking the cosmic with the organic through the half-living element and the half-living organisms it produced.

In some respects, Burke’s work was thus entirely of a piece with various long-standing traditions that by the nineteenth century frequently viewed cosmic and organic evolution as operating by the same means and functioning as essentially the same process.6 Indeed, it had been commonplace throughout the nineteenth century to speak of cosmic evolution as essentially a “developmental” or unfolding process. Just how organic evolution might have illustrated cosmic processes was never entirely clear, but Burke’s experiments with radium, sitting at the precise juncture of these two discourses of inorganic and organic evolution, were ideally situated to rework these older traditions. As Burke put it:

Burke’s work also fit well with the intractable series of debates and experiments on “spontaneous generation” that spanned much of the end of the nineteenth century and remained contested terrain well afterward. Despite his lack of prior interest in engaging in such debates, Burke initially framed his work in just these terms.8 Matching what James Strick has called a “late nineteenth-century gestalt” that held that there was “some single sine qua non” of life, Burke’s use of radium paralleled many other efforts to identify the ultimate “stuff of life”: “protoplasm” (the physical basis of life that had been popular in theories about the nature of life ever since Thomas Henry Huxley’s The Physical Basis of Life of 1869), “colloids,” “gemmules,” “plastidules,” “micelles,” “biogen,” or some other entity, depending on the theorist.9 As Strick has noted, “From the 1860s through the first decade of the twentieth century, theories abounded as to the simplest ‘living unit.’”10 In the context of the long nineteenth-century discourse of spontaneous generation, Burke’s work thus contributed not only to the physical reworking of the “living atoms” tradition, but also to the re-envisioning and biological reworking of a much older and long-standing tradition of “atoms of life” speculations, from Leibniz’s monads and Buffon’s and Maupertuis’s molécules organiques to Liebig’s monads of the mid-nineteenth century, and arguably even Haeckel’s more recent reflections on the connections between crystals and life (and his own brand of “monism”).11

Moreover, Burke’s work also fits into a diverse series of attempts around the turn of the century “to create life-like artifacts from inorganic matter”—a set of efforts that would later come to be called “synthetic biology.”12 Researchers in this tradition often claimed to produce useful mineral, crystalline, or other models for living systems rather than actual living beings themselves. Such experimentation was intended as an aid to speculation about the nature of life and perhaps even its provenance.13 Burke’s work fit with this tradition as well. Uninterested in merely rehearsing familiar claims to have created life in the test tube, he ultimately came to claim not that his experiments had produced life, but that they had produced something far more ancestral. By ultimately disavowing the label of “spontaneous generation” for his work, and by weaving together radium with the history of life on the primordial earth, Burke would soon come to characterize his work as the one of the earliest experimental attempts to get at the question of the historical origin of life on the early earth.

This chapter thus builds on the repeated suggestion in the literature that there are deeper continuities between the spontaneous generation of the 1870s and the later emergence of origin-of-life studies in the early twentieth century. While the larger tale of this decades-long shift from spontaneous generation to the emerging field of the origin of life extends far beyond the immediate case at hand, radium was a heretofore unacknowledged keystone bridging these worlds of the animate and the inanimate. Moreover, the Cavendish physicist’s radiobes present a story of how radium came to life in a second way, through the weaving together of three different legacies. Baptized in the fiery controversies of spontaneous generation, inheritor to the rich legacies of cosmic evolution, and matching thoughtful speculation with real-world experiment, radium would turn out to have a central role to play in reworking all three of these legacies. The element with a half-life and the half-living element would produce a half-living thing.

A Bit of Beef Tea

As Burke himself later recounted, it was at the start of the Michaelmas term in October 1904 that he “exhibited to a host of people at the Cavendish and Pathological Laboratories at Cambridge these first experiments made on the action of radium salts on sterilised bouillon. The bodies thus observed were very curious indeed, and some of their properties very remarkable.”14 Plunk a bit of radium chloride or bromide from an ordinary test tube in sterilized bouillon, Burke said (fig. 3)—nothing more than “beef tea,” as one critic opined15—and this was the result:

Burke conducted more experiments on May 10, and he published his findings in a letter to Nature on May 25, 1905, in which he described his technique in further detail and repeated his statement of surprise: “Bouillon is acted upon by radium salts and some other slightly radio-active bodies in a most remarkable manner.”17 (One commentator wondered if Burke might “have been a little premature in writing to Nature” in order to secure priority, but excused the fault as “nowadays a common one, particularly where radium is involved.”18)

Burke was called on a few months later to describe the results of his experiments before the Ordinary General Meeting of the Röntgen Society in London. Burke was introduced on December 7, 1905, to the “unusually large” assembled crowd by the newly installed president of the society—none other than Frederick Soddy—and “was received with applause.”19 According to the minutes of the meeting, Burke made preliminary references to the work done by others on the creation of artificial cells and on the actions of various salts on beef gelatine—a typical medium for growing microorganisms in vitro at this time—before turning to the more remarkable substance of his own experiments. Burke’s strange growths “possessed a peculiar structure,” the minutes noted, and were observed to grow in size over the course of days, showing an “evolution of shapes”:

Or, as Burke himself noted:

Existing at the limits of microscopic vision, Burke’s growths were at times extraordinarily difficult to see, ranging in size from about 0.3 micrometers (or less than 1/60,000 of an inch by another account) to the merest of specks. Burke reported that they were “only visible with a very high power of the instruments—scarcely visible, indeed, with one-sixth-inch focus power, plainly visible with one-twelfth.”21 Resolving the nature of these growths thus required frequent reference to Burke’s “photographs,” although some of them looked more like hand drawings than photographs. A few of these images were published along with Burke’s initial report in Nature (additional images accompanied his later 1906 book The Origin of Life; see fig. 4).22 Burke even showed a photograph of his growths “in which the nucleate structure could be seen” to the Röntgen Society. Burke’s images were of enormous interest; they also, however, required constant interpretation. As the Daily Chronicle remarked, photographs of the “magnified growths” showed “globular dots signifying nothing to the unexpert eye, but much to the trained intelligence of the scientist.”23

Though they might look superficially like bacteria, it was clear to Burke that his growths were not bacteria or recognizably “life as we know it.” Subcultures did not form when inoculated into a fresh gelatine; the growth patterns were peculiar (with cultures developing only some significant time after exposure, and growing only “slightly”); and the new forms had a perplexing tendency to grow only in the dark and to vanish in sunlight, to be soluble in water, and to simply vanish at 35°C rather than to coagulate as bacteria would. These were all strong reasons to doubt any attempt to grant full vitality to the new forms. Sims Woodhead, a Cambridge pathologist, had pronounced that Burke’s radiobes were not bacteria. As one of the most popular science writers of the day, C. W. Saleeby, noted:

The growths lasted only “a fortnight or so” before proceeding to “break up,” “dissolve,” and “disappear” of their own accord at the end of their unnatural life. “Yet,” as Saleeby remarked, “they seemed to be alive.”25 Or, if not quite living, Burke’s new forms at least exhibited some of the main characteristics essential to life. Burke also described the forms, with a distinctively atomic terminology and a vitalistic cast, as growing atoms.26 Or, as he wrote in his letter to Nature: “They are clearly something more than mere aggregates in so far as they are not merely capable of growth, but also of subdivision, possibly of reproduction, and certainly of decay.”27 Burke’s lifelike growths—said to be the result of his having “vitalized” gelatine with radium28—were also portrayed in the popular press almost immediately after their discovery as “shortlived but independent little atoms.”29 The strange new forms even—or so Burke reported—underwent cellular division akin to mitosis. Trained solely as a physicist, Burke may have been more than a little ignorant of the fundamentals of cytology, but he certainly knew that finding such fissioning in these inorganic forms was a point well worth advertising.

Far enough from truly living things, and yet just as far from being mere crystals, Burke’s growths showed a kind of “physical metabolism” somewhere between accretion (an inorganic process) and assimilation (an organic process). And so Burke readily extended the living metaphors that Soddy and others were already using to describe and conceptualize novel radioactive phenomena to his curious new growths, forms that seemed even more obviously “alive” than the radium compounds themselves. Paralleling Soddy’s vitalized discourse of radioactive “transition-forms” or “metabolons” in the grand story of cosmic evolution, Burke took his radium-induced growths to be new particular and peculiar instantiations of a larger physical metabolism that “is everywhere present” and which could be “controlled by certain types of inorganic bodies; but most of all by the vital units which form the basis of all life.”30 The growths, Burke thus suggested, although they “obviously lie altogether outside the beaten track of living things,” were still properly to be considered “within the realm of biology.” He held that they were “suggestive” of both the nature and the origin of life, and perhaps qualified even as transitional forms of life, as “they appear to possess many of the qualities and properties which enable them to be placed in the borderland, so to speak, between crystals and bacteria—organisms in the sense in which we have employed the word, and possibly the missing link between the animate and the inanimate.”31

The widespread attention the radiobes drew and the debates they helped engender, the provocative connections of the radioelements with the hot early earth on which life may have originated, and the slipping of a vitalized discourse of radioactivity across the realms of the physical and the organic with several overlapping senses of “half-life”32—all these factors came together to permit Burke’s radiobes to resonate powerfully and simultaneously in several different registers and realms.

How Experiments Begin

An active researcher at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, Burke was well placed but far from well known at the time of his sensational discoveries. As a popular lecturer on the radium circuit at the height of the radium craze, Burke was a young, respectable, and perhaps respected (though no one was quite sure) scientific investigator. (He was such an unknown quantity in 1905 that the New York Daily Tribune, evaluating his meteoric rise to fame, was forced to ask, “Now, who is this young man and what has he done?”33)

This much was clear to his contemporaries: born in Manila on November 4, 1873, and raised in Dublin, John Benjamin Butler Burke matriculated at Trinity College before becoming a lecturer at Birmingham and later a fellow at Manchester. By 1898 Burke had moved on to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he found himself granted access to the prestigious Cavendish Laboratory, and where he received his M.A. in research under the eminent physicist J. J. Thomson in 1902. Burke’s biological training was minimal at best, but at the Cavendish, where he was surrounded by fellow physicists, this proved to be no obstacle to undertaking physicalist researches with a potentially fundamental biological import. His institutional situation, the nature of his experiments, and the nature of his claims all served to reinforce a link between the transmuting processes of radioactivity and the potential uses of that transmutation for crossing the border between the lifeless and the living.

The Cavendish was an exciting place to be in the first years of the new century. Founded in 1871, it was almost immediately recognized as the best laboratory in Britain for new advances in physics and chemistry, which included the discovery of the electron, the characterization of cathode rays, and the study of “the discharge of electricity through gases.”34 Under Thomson’s leadership, a number of “advanced students” from other universities (and selected countries) who had not completed their undergraduate work at Cambridge were permitted into the laboratory.35 The first of these advanced students, including Ernest Rutherford, arrived at the Cavendish in 1895.36 Arriving the following year, as one of 39 other students who worked in the lab during the period 1896–1900, Burke aimed to study the production and propagation of the phosphorescence of gases in the presence of an electrical discharge.37

He began his research career ordinarily enough, writing a paper entitled “Luminosity and Kinetic Energy” for the British Association in 1902, and another, “On a Modification of FitzGerald’s Model of the Ether,” in 1904, and contributing a note for the Proceedings of the Royal Society on fluorescence and absorption, among other publications.38 Just as fluorescent and phosphorescent phenomena had induced Henri Becquerel to investigate and eventually discover radioactivity, however, Burke’s interests led him to the study of the properties and effects of radium that was soon to make him famous.39 In the first popular account of Burke’s experiments, the Daily Chronicle reported that “it had not occurred to anyone, however, that even the workers of the Cavendish Laboratory would detect any connection between the phenomena of radium and the problem of the origin of life.”40 It had, however, occurred to Burke.

Open to “any Cambridge man who wanted to research physics,” the Cavendish was a place where Burke would have been largely left to his own devices.41 The extent of this laissez-faire tradition was such that researchers “freely made” shifts of research focus that were “sometimes casual, sometimes dramatic.” This tradition does much to account for the freewheeling nature of Burke’s research. Even though studies of radioactivity were not among the laboratory’s primary interests, the Cavendish was sufficiently well endowed to have ready access to radioactive materials, and Burke was already familiar with the radioactive work of Rutherford and Soddy. This institutional environment enabled Burke to pursue his own rather unorthodox interest in radium.42

“All Matter Is Alive—That Is My Thesis”

Burke’s wholesale adoption of the discourse of living radioactivity is readily apparent. No stranger to Ernest Rutherford and Frederick Soddy’s work on atomic disintegration, he had in fact already summarized their work in the popular digest the Monthly Review in 1903, shortly before beginning his own experiments with radium. Describing with biological metaphors how “radio-activity is . . . infectious, but the infected body recovers in the course of time,” Burke noted that the “continual formation” and “gradual destruction” of “radioactive stuff” caused him to “perceive a striking analogy which appears to exist between such a process and that of metabolism, although the two phenomena, so far as our knowledge at present goes, are distinct.” A ready comparison with processes known to take place with “complex molecules of albumen” was possible, Burke knew, “but here once more we must be careful lest our imagination should carry us away, and lead us into regions of pure fancy, to a height beyond the support of experimental facts.” But the process of “perpetual change” in matter nevertheless intrigued him:

Burke concluded by noting that at long last, perhaps a clue was available “as to the ultimate constitution, perhaps also as to the ultimate destiny, not only of Life as we know it, but of a simpler Life, that of matter too.”44 Burke’s interest in the “life” of matter and the processes of “physical metabolism” is strikingly apparent here a full year before he began his experiments on the effects of radium on gelatine.

Burke’s claim that “all matter is alive” itself has a rich history dating back at least to the philosophical musings of nineteenth-century Naturphilosophen such as Novalis or Schelling. But in using the new phenomena of radioactivity to characterize life, Burke’s approach dovetailed nicely with Soddy’s relation of life to radioactivity—his ongoing discourse of living radium, his references to a radioactive early earth, his discussion of “transition-forms” and metabolons in the great saga of cosmic evolution. “The ‘radium’ may be, and I am at present not loath to think is, that state of matter that separates, or perhaps unites the organic and the inorganic worlds,” Burke noted. Moreover, this vitalized terminology of radioactive phenomena also served as a provocative sign pointing to the nature and perhaps even the origin of life: “In the radio-activity of matter and the products produced by it, in their growth, disintegration and decay, may be sought that vital principle and source of vital energy which in the beginning withstood that high temperature at which most assuredly our planet must have once existed.”45

Soddy’s framing, the broader contemporaneous radium craze, Burke’s thesis that “all matter is alive,” and his belief that radium had vitalizing powers were all factors leading toward his radiobe experiments. But so, too, were his years of study: by the time of his 1904 experiments, Burke had been regularly publishing papers on fluorescence and phosphorescence in the Philosophical Transactions and elsewhere for several years.46 He was particularly intrigued by the luminous glow produced on a screen when a radioactive object was brought near. Drawing perhaps on Rutherford and Soddy’s disintegration theory, Burke supposed that the scintillations on the fluorescing screen were the result of the formation and decay of molecular aggregates. Partly as a result of these and other experiments on phosphorescent bodies, Burke proposed a connection between light and life and sought to explore “whether such dynamically unstable groupings could be produced by the action of radium upon certain organic substances.”47 Dynamically unstable groupings might prove to be responsible not only for phosphorescence, but also for some of the properties of life.

As already noted, phosphorescence had long seemed a natural link between the realms of the inorganic and the organic, and the supposition that both phosphorescence and life involved the molecular aggregation and disaggregation of molecules was far from new. That phosphorescence might parallel, or in some way even generate, a basic kind of living metabolism seemed obvious not only to Burke, but also to several of his predecessors. Indeed, Burke himself readily acknowledged that the inspiration for his first attempts to study phosphorescence and internal energy transformation came from Eduard Pflüger’s earlier praise of cyanogens and Max Verworn’s focus on metabolism.

Both Pflüger and Verworn had found numerous provocative analogies between cyanogens and what they termed “living proteid.” In searching for the molecular basis of life, Verworn had wondered whether it might be cyanogen itself that granted to “living proteid molecules its characteristic properties.” Earlier, Pflüger had gone even further in a remarkable statement: “This similarity is so great that I might term cyanic acid a half-living molecule.”48

Burke first encountered Pflüger’s claim that the phosphorescence of the cyanogens reflected certain elements of life while he was a fellow at Owens College in Manchester. Although at first he thought the theory was “a rather wild one,” it ultimately seemed to him “a very reasonable thing that if cyanogen was a living thing it ought to grow in culture media.” After failing in his first attempts to grow it, and “observing that radium had several qualities in common with cyanogens—it is highly excitable and contains a vast store of energy,” he turned to radium.49

Whatever the merit and internal coherence of Pflüger’s and Verworn’s positions, Burke found an undeniable resonance between their accounts and the properties of and discourses surrounding radium. Into the thorny debate over spontaneous generation; wrapped up with Pflüger’s talk of half-living cyanogens and the necessity of a labile chemical compound whose internal metabolism could itself be held responsible for the characteristics of life; an intimate heir to Verworn’s focus on metabolism as the root of all vital phenomena and his account of the history of the vital process as a complex motion partaking in some sense of the history of the cosmos—into all this entered radium. A number of other different threads also came together for Burke by the time of his 1904 experiments: the laissez-faire, vaguely radioactive atmosphere of the Cavendish; his role as a popular lecturer on the properties and wonders of radium; his thorough immersion in the living discourse of radioactivity that Soddy and others were helping to popularize; his interest in the properties of fluorescent and phosphorescent gases in the presence of electrical discharge; his acquaintance with the work of Pflüger and Verworn and their reference to the “half-living” molecule, cyanogen; and his attempts to culture cyanogen and then radium—all these were part of the pathway leading to the experimental discovery of half-living forms, his radiobes. Was Burke an innovative genius creating half-living forms or a well-placed crackpot? His reputation was made and unmade in the most public of ways.

“He Has Taken the World by Surprise”

Emerging contemporaneously with all the swirl and hubbub of the radium craze, the results of the experiments in Burke’s radioactive crucible “startled every scientist and immensely interested the public at large,” drawing both “overwhelming correspondence from many quarters of the globe” and “embarrassing publicity.”50 One journalist noted that Burke had “taken the world by surprise.”51 On the day of its big scoop, the Daily Chronicle had already captured an element of Burke’s diffidence, describing him as “unaffectedly modest and somewhat reticent about his remarkable discovery,” reporting that “he discussed the matter as calmly as he might have described the merits of a new lamp or a water-tap.”52

Burke’s experiments not only revitalized the “spark of life” trope, but were rapidly re-inscribed within the frame of the life-as-electricity connection: “The manifest intimate connection between vital and electrical phenomena is all in favour of the validity of Mr. Burke’s conclusions,”53 noted one commentator, while the New York Times remarked, “We leave to the next generation the task of ferreting out the genealogy of the radiobe and the electron.”54 Indeed, Burke’s results were taken to drive what was known at the time as “the electrical theory of matter” in new directions: “The new theory of the composition of an atom and the possibility that one element may be transmuted into another relate only to the nurture of inanimate matter. A hint that life may spring out of the latter without the exercise of will or intelligence is vastly more startling,” reported the New York Daily Tribune.55 “It is more than probable,” said another commentator, “that radium is one of the A B C stepping-stones to such a law of cosmic life.”56

Saleeby, after initially confessing that it took him “many readings of Mr. Burke’s letter to persuade me that it would not be possible to detect some fallacy, some experimental error somewhere,” shortly afterward waxed eloquent about Burke’s findings, telling “tales of cells of gelatin all but alive.”57 Like many others, Saleeby had already speculated in 1904 that radium was the new philosophers’ stone, as it led from one element to another.58 But by 1906, Saleeby went so far as to enthusiastically popularize Burke’s claim that the radiobes might constitute a “missing link” between the inorganic and organic realms. Such work, he said, was “profoundly altering our view of matter and utterly disorganizing the accepted definitions of life.” If even so-called “lifeless” matter, “the seat of incessant, manifold, potent, and seemingly self-caused activities . . . must undergo a profound alteration,” he asked, was there any meaningful “difference in kind between living and so-called lifeless matter”? “If anything in the world is alive,” he asked, “is not radium alive?” Saleeby concluded that the question of whether Burke’s radiobes were alive depended on considering “the reputed behavior of an atom of radium.”59 Burke agreed: “The question of whether the microscopic forms therein described are, or are not, living things depends altogether upon what our conception of life is, and upon how broad or how narrow is the definition we are willing to accept of the phenomena of vital processes.”60 For Burke, the answer was clear: the “disintegration and decay of inorganic substances is one of the most remarkable analogies between them and living matter.”61

By the end of the summer, Burke’s discovery was still making headlines as his results were being considered everything from provocative to a prank. W. P. Pycraft called out overly eager journalists as “ill-informed enthusiasts [who] ecstatically assured us that the greatest of all mysteries had now indeed been laid bare, and this by the aid of radium and a little beef-tea!” Pycraft was merciless in his criticism: it was “a pity” that the radiobes were incapable of long-term survival, but even their disintegration, he noted ironically, was said to show signs “so closely suggestive of death” as to signify “the crowning glory of the discovery.”62

But by September another commentator was calling the radiobes “the most surprising discovery since the first isolation of radium by M. Curie,” even though—in light of the “contradictory characteristics” of the radiobes—it was “evidently premature to speak of Mr. Burke’s discovery as in any way throwing light upon the chemical origin of life.”63 By November, others were touting Burke’s findings as “a discovery that has provoked more discussion, perhaps, than any event in the history of science since the publication of the ‘Origin of Species,’ for it has a direct bearing on all speculative theories of life.”64

If the discovery of radioactivity had uncovered the secret of matter, then Burke’s radiobes—not fully living but certainly having some of the properties of life and emerging in highly radioactive circumstances similar to those thought to exist on the early earth—bolstered the notion that the discovery of the secret of life was at hand. Indeed, newspaper accounts referred to Burke’s discovery in just these terms.65 The minutes of the Röntgen Society meeting pushed the seat of this secret of life still further: “There was probably something in the nucleus itself which had not yet been discovered. It might be that there was some element far more unstable than radium, and which possessed its properties in a more marked degree.”66 If radium itself was not the secret of life, then this radium of radium deeper within must surely be it.

Indeed, Burke’s experiments drew enormous attention. “The interest attached to them,” Burke said, “has been such that the brief note communicated to Nature, May 25th, 1905, and the few words uttered to a representative of the Daily Chronicle . . . have resounded from the remotest corners of the earth to an extent quite beyond the expectation even of my most apprehensive friends.”67 Radium was Burke’s ticket to fame, his experiments taking the press by storm and promoting him from his status as a dime-a-dozen lecturer on the radium circuit to “the most talked of man of science in the United Kingdom.”68 As Burke himself noted, “The interest in the question of spontaneous generation has scarcely surpassed, nor in some respects does it appear to have equaled, the enthusiasm which these experiments, whatever their ultimate bearing on the question, have aroused.”69

Mind the Gap: Redefining Spontaneous Generation

Burke’s experiments were clearly relevant to the unsettled debate over spontaneous generation in Britain, and his findings were regularly cast by the press in just these terms. At first, Burke was quite comfortable with this characterization. (In his 1906 book detailing the results of his experiments, The Origin of Life, Burke continued to use the discourse of spontaneous generation and even used the phrase as the title of his eleventh chapter.)70 He was well aware that he was reopening the spontaneous generation controversy, and he seemed to revel in bringing the materialist implications of his science to the forefront, along with the theological consequences they might provoke. As he remarked to the Chronicle, “Should my experiments prove the possibility of ‘spontaneous generation,’ it is a principle not in the least destructive of the deistic conception of the universe. In fact, if it can be shown that dust and earth can produce life on account of radio activity, it would only confirm the truth of Biblical teaching.”71 (On hearing this, one wit remarked that “he knew his Bible pretty well, but did not remember that it even hinted that life was produced by spontaneous generation, or that radio-activity acting on dust and earth produced it.”72) Others, in a deist vein, felt the discoveries were a “gain to religious thought.”73

When scientists were asked to give preliminary commentary on Burke’s findings, however, they were less sanguine about Burke’s intended revival of the debate. Gathering initial comment, the Daily Chronicle reported Sir William Ramsay as saying, “There may or there may not be something in the discovery. . . . I have seen what has appeared in the papers on the subject, and I think it is a pity that so much has been made of the demonstration.” Ilya Metchnikoff agreed that it was too early for comment and that more corroboration would be needed, while a professor of public health at University College, London, stated, “He is a bold man who would revive the theory of spontaneous generation, unless it is based upon work of the highest order.” Marie Curie, by contrast, was said to be “profoundly interested,” but as she was not “a biological expert,” the Chronicle reported, she “therefore hesitated to express any opinion at the present juncture as to the possibility or otherwise of spontaneous generation by the direct agency of radium.”74

Some newspapers had reported that Burke’s experiments implied that the creation of life was just around the corner—and some even reported that he had already accomplished it. For all his dabbling with the label “spontaneous generation,” however, Burke soon stated explicitly that his experiments did not prove spontaneous generation: “We do not claim to have produced spontaneous generation,” he said, “if by this term is to be understood the appearance of life from the absolutely lifeless.”75 The most he said he hoped to indicate was that “we have arrived at a method of structural organic synthesis of artificial cells, which, if it does not give us natural organic life such as we see existing around us, gives us at least something which admits of being placed in the gap, or, as it might preferably be called, the borderland, between living and dead matter, as familiarly understood.”76

Indeed, for all the journalistic hype—with writers leaping all over the discovery and energetically spreading the news among the populace on both sides of the Atlantic—many of the first reported scientific responses to Burke’s discovery were distinctly guarded. If corroborated, the radiobes would be a “sensational” find—the word was used time and again to describe Burke’s findings—but first reports were not to be taken instantly at face value.77 The Daily Chronicle captured the mood: “There is a general tendency in the scientific world to await further results before pronouncing definitely on the question.”78 But that didn’t stop the paper from continuing to run its lead story—potentially one of its biggest stories since its breaking the news of Roentgen’s discovery of X-rays to the British public in 1896—or from continuing to search out additional scientists with something to say about the radiobes. Many saw in Burke’s discoveries echoes of the discovery of similar bodies or artificial cells decades earlier by different means. But some, like Sir Oliver Lodge, saw in Burke’s work a confirmation of some of their own speculations. Lodge had published speculative comments only a month earlier on the “complex molecular aggregates” that would “probably be found on the road towards organic evolution.”79 By these, Lodge meant none other than the radioelements.

Having attended and been inspired by what he took to be a “brilliant” lecture by Rutherford at University College, London, Lodge had published an essay in the North American Review only a month before Burke’s experiments, asking, “What is life?” and “What is an element?” Burke’s work seemed to Lodge to be an experimental verification of a promising idea he himself had already been considering: that the evolution of matter in the elements might lead to the evolution of life. In fact, Lodge wondered whether “all effort at spontaneous generation has been a failure” either “because some essential ingredient or condition was omitted,” perhaps such as radium, or “because great lapse of time was necessary.”80

But if radium could theoretically bridge the gap, as Soddy, Lodge, and innumerable independent others dared to wonder, and if radium were the element of choice not only to bridge the living and nonliving worlds, but also to end the debate over spontaneous generation, then the discovery of Burke’s radiobes went one better. No longer was it necessary to claim that radium was “alive” in any substantive or provocative sense, or even that one had produced something living by means of radium. One could argue instead, as Burke did, for the critical role played by radium in the production of half-living forms, of a new kind of artificial life unlike the natural variety: “The vital processes in the radiobe and other such bodies constitute merely artificial life, as distinct from that natural life we see around us, and which it is beyond our wildest hopes to imitate, much less to create.”81 And elsewhere, “These cells are not alive in the familiar sense of the word. In fact they do not show more than the rudiments of vitality, when the word is used in its more extended sense; but they help to illustrate the manner in which cellular bodies may be formed from protoplasmic substance.”82 Indeed, Burke never claimed that his radiobes were living in the ordinarily understood sense: “To expect to make a full-blown bacillus at the present day,” he soon wrote, “would not be more absurd than to try to manufacture a man!”83 As the president of the New York Academy of Medicine summarized it, Burke’s aim was to do nothing less than “enlarge enormously our conception of what life is. He denies that protoplasm is its sole basis, and he thinks that practically all physical phenomena are vital phenomena.”84

Though Burke had at first happily endorsed the label “spontaneous generation” for his findings, by 1906 he realized the misunderstandings to which he was prone by continuing to use such terminology—not to mention his unwanted association with colleagues like Henry Charles Bastian, with whom he often disagreed.85 Through further careful reflections on the nature of life, the source of vitality, the place of the radioelements, and his own earlier work with cyanogens, Burke increasingly sought to distinguish his findings from those of spontaneous generation generally. While the production of “living organisms from inorganic matter would be without question a case” of spontaneous generation, Burke proposed instead that deep within inorganic substances there may be “some germ, or germs, still hitherto unknown, and of a nature quite distinct from any we have yet had reason to regard as living,” and yet which might have “the principle of vital process, in an elementary form, as a part and parcel of their being. It is so with the dynamically unstable substances which of their own account manifest radio-activity.”

Expanding on Soddy’s living metaphysics of radioactivity, Burke noted that the “dynamically unstable bodies” of the radioelements “have to some extent some of the properties of life . . . the products of radio-active bodies manifest not merely instability and decay but growth, sub-division, reproduction, and adjustment of their internal functions to their surroundings, a circumstance which I think will be found to be equivalent to nutrition.”86 Fully aware that this was “merely analogy,” and quoting Darwin’s line that “analogy is a deceitful guide,” Burke nevertheless felt that if analogy led to verifiable results, as his had done, then “its utility should have a greater claim to our attention than to be passed over with indifference and ignored.” In other words, Burke proposed, the analogy was more than merely suggestive.

Burke thus ultimately set out to redefine the focus of his investigation as something other than spontaneous generation as traditionally conceived. While appealing to, say, Louis Pasteur or John Tyndall and their arguments against spontaneous generation “sounds very simple, very clear, and very forcible,” Burke asked, “Has it really any bearing on the question as to whether radio-activity can afford the internal energy of vital processes?” Burke here recast the question into one that could be answered purely in a physical mode: physics could provide answers to questions in biology that biologists using their own methods had been stumped by. After all, “there are questions in biology of the deepest interest to the physicist.”87 Burke was apparently keen to cross treacherous disciplinary divides:

Burke’s confidence in this quest came in no small measure from his willingness to confront the eternal bugbear of biology: the question “What is life?” In a remarkable passage, Burke declared that biologists should feel free to pronounce on the question rather than constantly shy away from it—chemistry and physics had found their respective grounds in atoms, why not biology? “What is this unit or atom of life; whether it is a man, an acorn, a microscopic cell, or the atom of radium, or something else that we know nothing of?”89 While physiologists assumed that life came from life, one of the older and most established dicta of biology, Burke contended that “we physicists think that life is such an elementary form that its origin is to be found elsewhere. Radio active bodies disintegrate and decay, and therefore there is an analogy between the organic and the inorganic.”90 Moreover, physics would succeed where biology had failed, and would do so in precisely in the gap that Burke was so fascinated by. After all, he said, “Life-activity is a phenomenon of matter as much as radio-activity.”91 It was no longer enough to give rise to something merely like life. Rather, physics could help get at the first emergence of something that was like life because it was analogous to life, and perhaps even because it was a potential precursor to life. Burke was confident that physics would lead the way: “The problem of the origin of life, which the biologist for the time being has almost, if not altogether, abandoned, if not in despair, at least in quiet resignation, would thus appear to present more hopeful signs of yielding a solution in the hands of the physicist than in his own. I say this with all due deference.”92

Evolving Life

If radium had the ability to produce vaguely living forms, and if the early earth had higher levels of radium than it does at present—in what seemed an obvious corollary of Rutherford and Soddy’s theories of radioactive decay—then these radiobes might be much more than mere examples of spontaneous generation, and contested examples at that. They might instead be missing links in a larger chain of organic evolution, indicative not just of disputable life created in the here and now, but of the very first kinds of living things to have historically emerged on earth and that no longer existed.

With his petri dishes pregnant with possibility, Burke’s experiments with radium thus served as midwife to the nascent field of the study of the origin of life. Redefining terms such as “spontaneous generation” and “artificial life” (even as he continued to use them), Burke worked a fundamental transformation in the terms of the debate in the first decade of the twentieth century. No longer would scientists have to continue to endlessly debate the age-old question of the origin of life; Burke would instead provide them with the first form of experimental access to what he labeled an “obliterated page in the history of our planet.”93 Abiogenesis was not only a problem in evolution; it was a problem ripe for experimentation. Although Burke had claimed early on to be somewhat wary of extending the implications of his findings as far as the historical origin of life—publicly expressing misgivings at the Röntgen Society about such an extension—he proceeded to do precisely that, even at that very meeting. Burke’s radiobes thus not only bridged the gap between the living and the nonliving in the here and now, but also enabled Burke to at last bring together for the first time two separate discourses of evolution, one cosmic and the other organic, in experimental fashion.

Even if his radiobes could not properly be called living, he said, they were nevertheless “suggestive” of the origin of life in that they might correspond “to some simple form of life that existed in a far distant age” and which was unknown at present due to the action of natural selection over the eons.94 Just as Soddy had theorized that the radioactive elements were unstable “transition forms” in a grand process of cosmic evolution, with the most unstable already selected out, so Burke proposed that his radiobes might best be considered unstable transition forms in the origin of life and indicators of an evolutionary process from inorganic to organic that no longer existed on the earth: “Possibly they are a primitive form of life,” he concluded. “Nearly everything is radio-active. The earth itself is, and in some suitable medium life may have originated on the earth in that way.”95

Burke’s radiobes thus ultimately depended for their privileged status not on their demonstrated growth, division, or reproduction, but on their place within a narrative of the terrestrial evolution of life from nonlife and the half-living stage in between. The New York Times ran with this story line under the headline “The Microbe’s Ancestor,” saying that Burke had discovered “in a radium product . . . the ‘prehistoric ancestor’ of the microbe.” Breathlessly exclaiming that “the chemically dead compound is observed to give birth to living organisms,” the reporter described how “minute creatures revealing a highly organized structure push their way to the surface, display phenomena of ‘budding’ and reproduction, and after a slight development in the segregated state decay and are resolved into minute crystals. Mr. Burke is not prepared to affirm with positiveness that these organisms are quite alive. They may be half alive.”96 And just as Burke’s radiobes sat poised halfway between life and nonlife, Burke’s own position hovered somewhere between the discourse he had come from and the discourse he was helping to inaugurate. Burke’s discourse of the half-living was, fittingly, only half-born.

When dealing with experiments on the edge of life, words matter as much as things.97 While the story of the progression from the half-living element glowing in the dark to a half-living radiobe growing in the dark might seem at first a mere rhetorical pleasantry, radium and radiobes found a real connection in Burke’s mind, and in the minds of his contemporaries, through their common half-living status. And this connection was made possible by Burke’s peculiar redefinition of spontaneous generation and his marriage of the two seemingly independent discourses of organic and inorganic evolution, not only through a common radioactive metaphysics but through experiment itself.

“Something Queer Has Happened in His ‘Bouillon’”

While some reports had held that Burke understood that “radium was the life-producer” and that a radiobe was “actually a living organism,”98 others claimed that Burke had even been able to obtain subcultures, and that the growth of the radiobes continued even in the absence of radium. A rash of newspaper headlines trumpeted, “Generation by Radium,” “The Secret of Life,” and “The Microbe’s Ancestor.”99 Burke had largely shied away from overt sensationalization and frequently underplayed his findings in the popular press: the New York Times had even quoted him as saying, “What has been done has suggested vitality. Do not put it higher than that.”100 As another reporter noted early on, “What Prof. Burke says is not so much more than that something queer has happened in his ‘bouillon,’ and that it seems to have developed life out of unlife.”101 Burke’s statements were actually quite modest when compared with the enormous stir his experiments aroused. But just what he had claimed he had done changed in the reportage of the time as his work increasingly fell from favor.

Burke’s vaunted position at the Cavendish and his academic pedigree initially protected him from some of the worst of the attacks. His work deserved “the most respectful consideration,” opined the New York Daily Tribune: “The simple fact that such leaders in science as Lord Kelvin and Professor J. J. Thomson have faith in his character and capacity, while it is not a verdict on the young Irishman’s experiments themselves, indicates his title to a hearing.”102 Even an unfavorable review of his later book detailing the experiments held that “Mr. Burke has been the victim” of “the sensational announcements of his discoveries or observations,”103 though another source saw Burke as “willing prey, to an enterprising journalist . . . [who] made the most of his time.”104 Another review held that “Mr. Burke has had the misfortune to be heralded by a particularly loud fanfare, and if the result causes disappointment he must thank his trumpeters. When the world is informed that a mountain is in labour the mouse that issues, though quite a good mouse, is rendered ridiculous.”105 Other commentators reprimanded the purveyors of such yellow journalism: “A study of the original authorities is always advisable before publishing their contents. For the sake of scientific journalists who may wish to publish Mr. Burke’s future discoveries to a wider circle, we may perhaps state that the price of Nature is sixpence, and that it can usually be obtained at the larger railway bookstalls.”106

Once the initial tempest had subsided, cooler heads were called on to investigate the phenomenon more fully and pronounce on it. One witty Fellow of the Royal Society remarked that while there may have been plenty of radium on the early earth there certainly wasn’t any beef-tea.107 Another critic similarly took issue with Burke’s use of bouillon, calling it a “highly developed proteid” and animal product: “If he has obtained organisms, his discovery will do much to show how matter that has once lived may be made to live again, but it will not in the least explain the origin of life on this planet for the proteid essential to the experiment is itself a highly specialised product of animal activity.”108 In the same vein, the remarkably named systematic theologian Agar Best remarked that “unquestionably our planet was once destitute even of bouillon, i.e., of the marvelous and complicated carbon compounds which are the constant garb of life, and are found only where there is or has been life.”109

Even Saleeby, one of Burke’s foremost popular advocates, claimed that Burke’s experiments “offer no correspondence at all to the conditions which must have obtained on this planet, hundreds of millions of years ago” and that “there is no evidence . . . that salts of radium were present upon this cooling earth of aeons ago, in any proportion comparable to that of the radium in Mr. Burke’s test tubes.” Moreover, he noted, Burke’s experiment “would be irrelevant, since not only the experimenter but also his beef gelatin are themselves products of life”:

Saleeby concluded, nevertheless, that Burke’s accomplishment was “signal enough,” and he praised Burke for, like his rival Bastian, having “gone far to show that spontaneous generation occurs in the world to-day.”111

Burke quickly countered his critics by saying that any experiment would have to make use of conditions not available on the early earth, but that this need not invalidate his findings:

Nevertheless, the tide of opinion began to turn against Burke. The New York Times went on record scandalously associating his radiobes with the very N-rays he had years before been instrumental in criticizing: “His ‘radiobes’ will be best seen by the ‘N-rays,’ about which there was not long ago a hot dispute, now quite died away, but as the professor is not too sure one way, other people will be most safe if they refrain from being too sure the other.”113 Others immediately asked the obvious question: Was the bouillon used thoroughly sterilized? Was contamination a possibility? The Daily Tribune called for “independent verification from competent experts.” And indeed, as alternative interpretations of Burke’s findings went hand in hand with stronger criticism, attention focused primarily on those critics who attempted to replicate Burke’s results.

Among Burke’s top critics was Sir William Ramsay, a discoverer of the noble gases and an authority on the products of radioactive disintegration.114 Ramsay not only disparaged Burke’s attempt to reopen the spontaneous generation controversy, but also—in a letter to Nature of his own—called Burke’s account “mad,” the unworthy reporting of a “mad experiment.”115 Ramsay swiftly explained the radiobes away in purely physicalist terms as the mere aftereffects of the emanations of radium acting on the bouillon. In “a well-considered and frankly skeptical and sensible article”116 first published in the Independent, Ramsay argued that the heat and gases given off by the radium as a by-product of its decay would undoubtedly disturb the bouillon just as a solution of gas in water could coagulate the white of an egg. As Ramsay wrote:

For Ramsay, the life span of a given bubble—which “would resemble a yeast cell” and, by implication, constitute one of Burke’s “radiobes”—along with its quasi-reproduction by “budding” or death by “bursting,” would last only so long as the radium remained active (“the best part of a thousand years”). “The ‘life,’” Ramsay noted, “therefore, would be a long one, and the ‘budding’ would impress itself on an observer as equally continuous with that of a living organism.”117 Despite having written eloquently just a few months before about the potential connections between the discovery of radioactivity (“the philosophers’ stone”) and the elixir vitae, Ramsay was unconvinced by Burke’s work.118 In fact, Ramsay was instrumental in increasing doubt surrounding the existence of the radiobes. By the following spring of 1906, the New York Times noted that it was largely thanks to Ramsay’s explanation that “the quietus is put upon the theory of Burke that he has created a cell, or the beginning of organic life, through radium.”119

Ramsay was far from the only critic, however. The experimental nail in the radiobes’ coffin came from W. A. Douglas Rudge, one of Burke’s former colleagues at the Cavendish from 1900 to 1902, who performed a series of experiments explicitly designed to figure out just what had happened at Burke’s lab bench. Rudge soon became Burke’s nemesis in the radiobe controversy. Rudge designed his experiments carefully, attempting to replicate Burke’s experiments in similar media, and was also committed to using photographs to convince his readers that Burke’s “radiobes” were in fact nothing but radium precipitates, remarking that his own work “deals chiefly with the results obtained by the aid of photography, which obviously is a much more satisfactory method of recording than mere drawing.”120

In a communication to the Royal Society made on his behalf by J. J. Thomson—who may have been trying to distance the Cavendish and its reputation from Burke—Rudge concluded from his systematic examination of all kinds of metallic salts that only those of strontium, lead, radium, and barium had any effect akin to what Burke had found: “As these metals are those which form insoluble sulphates, it seemed likely that the growth originated about the precipitates which form with the sulphur compounds present in the gelatin.”121 Rudge also found that gelatin made with distilled water produced no precipitates, but that gelatin made with tap water produced a “very dense growth.” “It was thus quite evident,” he concluded, “that the presence of a sulphate was necessary for the formation of the growth.”122 The radiobes, in other words, were nothing but sulfate precipitates.

Rudge retraced his experiment step-by-step: “The first effect of the action of radium salt was to cause an evolution of gas in the form of minute bubbles, owing to the decomposition of the water; the evolution soon ceased, but simultaneously a nebulous growth was seen to proceed from the point of contact of the salt with the gelatin,” which continued rapidly for a time before slowing down and then ceasing. “This precipitate,” Rudge concluded, “has, undoubtedly, a sort of cellular structure.” Nevertheless, any further resemblance to Burke’s radiobes failed to materialize. Rudge noted, for example, that “many ‘pairs’ of cells” could be seen, but that their “grouping is purely fortuitous,” and moreover, that his constant photographing revealed nothing of “the nature of ‘cell division’ or growth, in the usual sense, taking place.” Perhaps most tellingly, Rudge wrote, “there is no trace of a nucleus, even on pushing the magnifying power by projection up to 12,000!!, this figure being, of course, a long way past the limit of ‘useful’ magnifications.” Rudge tested again for the formation of radiobes without sulfate, and obtained none: “It thus seems to be quite clear that the cellular growth cannot be produced by radium or barium unless a sulphate is present.”123

As impure radium was often found associated with barium, Rudge interpreted Burke’s and his own failure to carry out inoculation of subcultures as consistent with the interpretation of the radiobes as precipitates of barium sulfate. Curiously, what for Burke had indicated that the radiobes were not quite living—their inability to develop a culture on fresh medium as real bacteria would—served for Rudge as evidence for the purely physical nature of the radiobes. (Burke denied the precipitate argument altogether, saying that he had found the radiobes to be soluble in warm water, whereas barium sulfate, quite plainly, was not.)

Rudge concluded from his experiments that radium had “no specific action in forming cells” and that any observed effect was caused by the barium often associated with radium. Pure radium salt would probably produce only the evolution of gas, he concluded, since “radium salts are less satisfactory as cell-formers than the impurer ones.” Most damningly, Rudge concluded from his photographs that “the cells do not divide or bud or show anything resembling ‘karyokinesis,’ the growth very quickly reaches a maximum, and they do not decay or split up, save as a consequence of the drying of the gelatin.” All in all, he concluded, “radio-active substances, unless they contain barium, do not give rise to the formation of cells.”124 Rudge’s experimental “disproof” of the radiobes’ existence, reducing them to mere physical precipitate, was by far the strongest criticism of Burke’s findings.125

Still others, like Jacques Loeb, criticized Burke’s radiobes for having only “an external resemblance to living cells”: experiments that produced colloidal precipitates that “imitate the structures in the cell” were common, but such precipitates routinely lacked “the characteristic synthetic chemical processes” central to life.126 Artificially producing life, Loeb thought, required the production of a “substance capable of development, growth, and reproduction” and that synthesized the chemicals it needed for growth: “Whoever claims to have succeeded in making living matter from inanimate will have to prove that he has succeeded in producing nuclear material which acts as a ferment for its own synthesis and thus reproduces itself. Nobody has thus far succeeded in this, although nothing warrants us in taking it for granted that this task is beyond the power of science.”127 To make autosynthesis a requirement for life, however, was precisely to deny Burke’s claim that life may have originated in many different ways and, moreover, that primitive life might look distinctly different from contemporary life. (It seems ironic that Loeb, famous for his engineering approach to life, was more concerned with the historical characteristics and trajectory of living systems than Burke.) Loeb was also bothered by the loose use of words and metaphors: “The purely morphological imitations of bacteria or cells which physicists have now and then proclaimed as artificially produced living beings, or the plays on words by which, e.g., the regeneration of broken crystals and the regeneration of lost limbs by a crustacean were declared identical will not appeal to the biologist.”128 Nevertheless, Burke and Loeb were routinely lumped together in the popular press as proponents of “artificial life,” though their techniques, and even their ideas of what “artificial life” could possibly be, were to some degree distinguishable: Burke was after the artificial production of life; Loeb, its artificial control.

“Biology Is Decidedly Not His Forte”

Burke summarized his many experimental findings in The Origin of Life: Its Physical Basis and Definition (1906), which united and expanded on his earlier publications. Strangely enough, reference to this fascinating founding text in the origin of life literature has by and large disappeared (as has any awareness of Burke’s role more generally). But this is perhaps not without reason: contemporary reviews of Burke’s book were distinctly less than flattering.

The Dublin Review, while calling the book “highly interesting” and acknowledging the “wide circle of readers” it would undoubtedly reach, called it an “unconvincing work, marred by some curious errors and rendered exceedingly difficult of comprehension in divers places by the singularly involved style in which it is written.” Burke’s work was also cytologically rather naïve and was dependent on a somewhat idiosyncratic understanding of “organism” and “life”: “We more than doubt whether Mr Burke would find any biologist willing to adopt his definition as anything like an adequate or satisfactory summation of the facts.” Equally troubling for many readers was Burke’s crossing of disciplinary divides and his “unwarrant[ed]” mixing up of “physical questions” with “biological considerations.” But the most egregious way in which Burke failed his cause was his demonstrated lack of proficiency in biological terminology. For all his knowledge of the elements of physics, one reviewer noted, Burke displayed a “fundamental ignorance of the elements of biology. . . . This is a strong statement, but we think we can justify it.” The reviewer pointed out Burke’s errors in thrice misidentifying chlorophyll as chromatin, his failure to acknowledge that the primitive non-nucleated living cell (or “Monera”) “probably does not exist and never did exist,” his failure to understand that protoplasm was no longer generally considered to be crystalline in nature, his misunderstandings concerning the nature of fertilization, his equation of the nucleolus with the centrosome, his misunderstanding (and misspelling) of “mytosis,” and more.129 Burke’s abysmal understanding of cytology and the phenomena of karyokinesis had even led him to state that his radiobes—contrary to the reigning biological state of affairs—divided cells before they divided nuclei.130 “These are errors which one ought not to be confronted with in a book which professes to deal with the fundamental laws of life and living things.”131 Burke was a physicist through and through, and his claims, while potentially of great interest and fascination to biologists, at times revealed a basic ignorance of biological fundamentals—a fact that his critics pointed out with glee. (So much for physics paving the way for biology.)

Burke’s competence was clearly under attack. According to one reviewer, Burke readily “demonstrate[d] that biology is decidedly not his forte,” while another commented on his several “errors indicative of haste, and [the] disconcerting lack of correspondence between some of the figures and the references to them in the text.”132 Another criticized Burke for the poor structure of the book—which discussed his experiments in only one of its nineteen chapters, and waited until the sixth chapter at that, with too many “preliminary considerations”—as well as its style: “It is to be hoped that he is more skilful with the test-tube than with the pen. His style is extraordinarily loose and awkward. . . . [Some of his sentences] have subjects without predicates, predicates without subjects, and sometimes neither subject nor predicate. Sometimes the construction is not English at all.”133

Editorial problems aside, the relevance of Burke’s experiments to the question of the origin of life remained equally contested. Sir Bertram Windle complained that Burke’s radiobes “at all times . . . appear to be soluble in warm water, and they end up as crystals. It is hard to see how objects of this kind can be held to throw any light upon the origin of life.” His radiobes seemed “more like some aberrant process of crystallization than the behaviour of a living organization.” And yet Burke’s novel reconceptualization of life was, time and again, noted front and center, with striking passages quoted in full, as when Windle quoted Burke’s statement that the radiobes were “analogous to living types and may, as we say, be called artificial forms of life, but they are not the same as life as we know it to-day. . . . If these artificial things are alive, it is not life as we know it in nature. It is not life which can claim descent from the remote past, and it is not life which will hand on its own type to the distant future.”134 This was a subtle point, hard for many to grasp, even when so clearly stated and prominently placed.

A reviewer of Burke’s book in Nature delivered another scathing assessment. Although noting that Burke spoke of his radiobes as “possessing n − 1 of the n properties of living bacilli,” the reviewer went on to complain that Burke went “soaring in a region where verification and contradiction are alike impossible.” Vigor without rigor was almost enough, but not quite: “The author is so enthusiastic over his radiobes and with nuclei that we almost wish we could believe more in the importance of either of them.”135 Even a friend and former colleague from Manchester saw in Burke’s book a new but ultimately unhelpful twist: “While defending his radiobes from the imputation of being dead bodies, [Burke] turns the difficulty by asserting that the radium from which they sprang was itself alive. Put in this way the whole matter resolves itself into a question of words, which is of no interest to the general reader.” Such play with words could only lead down a thorny path of “merely dialectic exercises.” In a critique similar to those made of Soddy at the time, this reviewer concluded that Burke “is sometimes apt to be carried away by a flow of language which suggests rather than conveys his meaning.”136

Burke’s reputation took a beating even in contemporary literature. His experiments were depicted not only in Arthur B. Reeve’s The Poisoned Pen (1913), but more extensively in W. H. Mallock’s novel An Immortal Soul (1908) as the odd doings of a scientifically inclined boy named Mr. Hugo. Pointing to some vials, Mr. Hugo tells an elder at one point, “Those . . . contain sterilized gelatine. As soon as I can get a little radium I am going to produce life.” Later in the book one of the characters recounts a conversation with Mr. Hugo that explicitly linked the new atom with the creation of life: “He’s been telling me all sorts of things about the sun and the earth’s shadow; and he’s going to reform humanity by manufacturing a new Adam; what is it out of, Mr. Hugo—a mixture of glue and radium?” “‘Well,’ said Dr. Thistlewood, taking Mr. Hugo’s hand, ‘I suppose she is thinking of radiobes.’”137 Other passages in the book include a description of Mr. Hugo thinking “that human beings can be made out of beef-tea”; of his creations as “something like the radiobes, which I hope I may be able to show you in my bottle”; his statement to another character: “I’ll show you something to-morrow. I am actually producing life with radium in a closed glass vessel”; and of his response to the offer of “a good rat-hunt” at a nearby lord’s estate: “‘Would you,’ asked Mr. Hugo, aghast at this bold proposal, ‘like that better than looking at my radium and the beginnings of life in my bottle?’”138

The radiobes in Mallock’s novel, as the putative origin of life in a bottle, are a laughingstock, a gag line even as they also represent the sublimated essence of human nature. As one of the main characters of the story is said to wonder (as if echoing H. G. Wells’s Tono-Bungay of the same year): “Was she merely an iridescence, a phosphorescence, on the quagmire of organic matter?” The only proper response to such materialistic metaphysical musings is apparently action, as the book ends on a skeptical note about the power of mere metaphor: “‘It’s idle to talk,’ he said, ‘if we are to canter off on a metaphor.’”139 Full of activity and conversation but strangely without a real sense of depth, Mallock’s novels were intriguingly described by one reviewer in terms that seem reminiscent of Burke’s own experiments: they were said to have “the semblance of life—of fine-spun energizing life—without the colour of it.”140

A Defense

As his role shifted from provocateur to disillusioned bystander, Burke rapidly tired of the limelight—or rather, the misunderstandings and misrepresentations of his work that being in the limelight involved. As he noted in a weary swan song published in The World’s Work in September 1907, over a year after the initial bout of publicity, his experiments “have been, in some instances at any rate, somewhat exaggerated in other respects, perhaps unduly misconstrued or misunderstood.” Reprimanding those most responsible, he portrayed the turn of events as “a less excusable misrepresentation on the part of some of those who, as critics, should have been better acquainted with the subject under discussion.”141

Burke mounted a strong counterattack against Rudge, retaliating one final time in the press before Rudge’s interpretations carried the day. He noted that Rudge’s claims that radium had no effect—that barium alone was responsible for the formation of the radiobes/precipitates—seemed especially “bold” given that the two elements had similar chemical properties while differing in their physical properties. More dramatically, Burke snidely drew attention to Rudge’s observations of N-rays as being of “rare interest, as he was the only man in England who could see anything with them.” Such a statement in 1907—well after the decline of N-rays—was critical indeed. Long opposed to N-rays, Burke must have felt insulted to have the validity of his own work impugned by a man who still believed in them (and who then worked—far from the Cavendish—as a science instructor at a local grammar school in Suffolk). Burke let the vitriol flow: “The schoolmaster above referred to has made some experiments with gelatin, agar, starch, and isinglass, but none of these substances contains albumin. And the results have been, as they might well have been expected to be, negative. In fact, nothing is easier than to obtain negative results. We have merely not to do the right thing and there it remains undone.”

Burke portrayed Rudge as an incompetent investigator who had mistakenly used commercial gelatin, containing “sulphuric acid and other common impurities,” rather than the gelatine Burke had employed. (As Burke made a point of noting, “This is generally spelt gelatine by chemists, to distinguish it from the commercial product.” Even the novelist Mallock had managed to spell the word correctly—although Burke’s own letter to Nature had referred to “gelatin.”) As radium would have had no effect on glycerin or gelatin but would have coagulated the albuminoids present in bouillon—which Rudge had neglected to include—Burke argued that Rudge hadn’t even properly approximated his experimental technique. Burke pulled chemical rank on the schoolmaster Rudge: “Gelatin, as every chemist knows, does not contain albumin, and the radium effect on it is nil.”

Burke reiterated his discoveries: The radiobes looked “like a diplococcus” and, pace Rudge, were not produced by barium, strontium, or lead. They grew, subdivided, and multiplied, “but unlike bacteria, they possessed a nucleus.” If the secret of life resided somewhere in the cell nucleus, and if radium truly bridged the inorganic and organic worlds, then it stood to reason—as Burke found to be the case in his experiment—that “this nucleus seemed to be in some way associated with the radium emanation.”142

Burke acknowledged the difficulties he faced in obtaining quality photographs in his earlier work—and the poor quality of the ones that Rudge had characterized as mere drawings—but remarked that “there are good ones given in my recently published book.” Burke also acknowledged the incredible rarity and expense of radium as one reason for the slow progress of his work—and as a possible reason why Rudge may not have carried out his experiments in the same way as Burke did. Indeed, on the day of the public announcement of his results in June 1905, Burke had remarked that his experiments were “necessarily expensive” and that as he was “working privately and without the support of any public body they are rather hampered by the lack of funds.”143 The situation had not changed a year later:

Some of the radium, in fact, appeared to disappear soon after it was added—a phenomenon that Burke noted “has puzzled a good many observers; and they are therefore rather chary of trying the experiment.”144 This was not, he emphasized, reason to substitute other metals, such as barium, strontium, or lead, that would give only negative results—as Rudge had done. Radium alone was capable of producing radiobes.

Burke’s Swan Song

In setting forth his case one last time, Burke scaled back the nature of his claims. He had not “solved” the “great enigma of life’s origin”; he had merely found a provocative clue. Commenting on the long and not-so-distinguished tradition of artificial cells and other forms mimicking life, which would soon be labeled “synthetic biology” by Stéphane Leduc, Burke declared, “We should dismiss from our minds the illusion that we may find the final solution of this enigma in the laboratory, in bottles, or in test-tubes.” We should never expect to be able to produce living forms identical to those extant today—“it is not likely, nor even to be expected, that we should obtain by such means life: such life as that which we see existing naturally around us”—because these forms are all the result of a long evolutionary history. But we might be able to produce what he thought were “simpler imitations” of them.145

Indeed, in discussing his 1906 book The Origin of Life and the “violent opposition” it encountered in some quarters, Burke acknowledged that he might have “more appropriately” titled it The Origin of Cells and the Physical Aspect of Life. Burke also acknowledged other claimants to the throne of “artificial life,” such as Leduc’s artificial cells, and diplomatically declared that Leduc’s inorganic morphological mimics of living things (like plants and mushrooms) “belong most probably to the same category of microscopic forms.”146 Leduc, who in a few years was to publish both Théorie physico-chimique de la vie et générations spontanées (1910) and La biologie synthétique (1912), had claimed much for his forms.147 For Burke, however, the point was to get at something more than mere mimics: to get at the nature of life itself. Leduc’s forms, though they may look like “blades of grass, leaves or ferns . . . have not the inherent and characteristic directive power of the living organism . . . that depends on the physical and chemical properties of the nucleus, wherein the mystery of life and of life’s origin now rests.”148

Burke was also well aware of prior attempts to create something approaching “artificial life,” such as various attempts by Sachs and Lehmann, though he claimed to be unaware of M. Raphael Dubois’s production of so-called “eobes,” despite their eerily similar name; there was a simmering priority dispute between Burke and Dubois.149 Burke had also faced a priority dispute with Martin Kuckuck of Saint Petersburg, whose Die Lösung des Problems der Urzeugung (1907) described similar experiments with radium and gelatine undertaken in February and March of 1905. (Kuckuck in his work argued that ionization led to organization, from “inorganic stuff” to “organic substance” and from thence to “organized substance” and “organisms.”) Burke was thus one of a diverse set of theorists and experimentalists actively trying to move the conceptualization of life to a new basis, and he generally readily acknowledged and even referred to others’ earlier attempts to create artificial cells, cells that incorporated foreign material, and cells that appeared to grow.150 It had “long since been discovered,” he noted, “that the action of potassium ferrous cyanide upon gelatine produced cells which were capable of absorbing water, and apparently ‘growing,’” but these earlier attempts did not show the phenomena of subdivision or reproduction. Burke thought these forms to be more like vacuolides and held that his own growths were something else altogether—that the sheer number of life-related phenomena they exhibited far surpassed earlier attempts to mimic life.

Fully aware of the history of the critique of analogies experienced by Otto Bütschli and others, Burke nevertheless held that his efforts were something closer to getting at the nature of life than a mere model. Burke didn’t want to just mimic life—he wanted to get at its underlying features. Convinced that he had produced something lifelike, or approaching the nature of life even if not quite living, Burke labeled his results “artificial life” in order to adequately distinguish them from the various forms of real life present in the world. And Burke’s most powerful argument for the validity of his radiobes as primitive forms of life was that they were distinctly not life as we know it. The very features that called them into question as living things—they were demonstrably not bacteria, and they were curiously soluble in water—were, for Burke, proof that he was onto something that was different and that may once have existed, even as these same characteristics were fodder for his opponents’ criticisms. Burke even proposed that perhaps the insolubility of the cells we know today was the result of natural selection from an earlier and different state.

In trying to save the phenomena with his theory, Burke thus played the last and most powerful card in biology that he could: the name of Darwin. He argued that his artificial cells followed the “same principles” outlined in Darwin’s Origin of Species, and that he was applying the doctrine of evolution to the evolution of life itself, wherein “the problem of life thus becomes resolved into a problem of physics, wherein the individual atoms themselves by natural selection in forming suitable aggregates play their part in the struggle for existence by the survival of such of them as may be best fitted to live.”151 The reason why radiobes didn’t exist in the present as a stepping-stone from nonlife to life, Burke said, was the same reason that there wasn’t as much radium around as there once must have been: natural selection. If his radiobes were truly simpler forms of life, Burke noted, they “may not possess all the properties of bacteria,” such as insolubility, or alternatively, “radium may convert insoluble proteids into soluble peptones under the action of water. The point being that there is no a priori reason for supposing that any primitive form of life hitherto undiscovered should be insoluble in water.”152 Natural selection thus operated not only in organic evolution (as Darwin had shown), and not only in cosmic evolution (as Soddy had argued), but in the very singularity where the two came together: in the origin of life.

Indeed, as one commentator noted, Burke never claimed that his radiobes were the “actual ancestors of living things, but rather [were] early forms which were so inefficient as to be crushed out in the struggle for existence by their more vigorous rivals from which life as it exists has been derived. And these true progenitors remain yet to be discovered.”153 Long before Aleksandr Oparin’s theory of gradual chemical evolution, and even before Benjamin Moore’s 1913 coining of the term “chemical evolution,” Burke thus proffered a theory that transferred natural selection from the biological realm to the pre-biological:

Living matter, as we know it, is but a species of matter which has been sifted out as the fittest to survive. In the infinite gradation from the most complex to the most simple we may perceive the same process in an ever simplifying degree. The fact of self-reproduction was an accident, and a happy accident in a particular type.154

For Burke, the transfer of a property from a group of living things to nonliving things—namely, natural selection as the mechanism of evolution—meant that there was no line to be drawn between the physical, the chemical, and the living: we can “deduce that the atoms and molecules of the chemist and physicist are of the nature of living things.” Because natural selection took place in both, Burke thought himself justified in saying that “in truth, life exists as much in one as in the other and the difference is only a question of degree.” He was surprised to have found himself the first (or at least he thought so) to have proposed a theory calling for such an overlap between the physical and biological realms, but went so far—despite all criticism—as to predict that “molecular physics will doubtless yet become a branch of biology.”155

Burke’s position was a precarious one, establishing the realm of the half-living by claiming lifelike characteristics for assuredly nonliving things, and his explanations routinely stepped into philosophical territory. His experiments got at the processes of natural selection involved in the emergence of life, and yet he was not claiming to have discovered the means by which life first originated. He was out to investigate the physical conditions for the origin of life, rather than attempting to answer questions about its actual, unique origin.156 That life “belongs to the evolutionary series is true of such life as has survived,” Burke noted, “but what of that which has been eliminated, which we are trying to produce in the laboratory?”157

Accordingly, Burke’s work did more to establish the conditions of possibility for later research into the origins of life than to provide any firm findings regarding its actual historical emergence. From Burke’s point of view, his investigations were intended to clear up the statement of the problem of the origin of life, not to have “accomplished its solution.”158 But, Burke concluded, “whether biologists will yet accept my view is not for me to say. If it is admitted to be a new view, it is no argument against it to say that it is not the accepted view at the present time.”159

The Aftermath

Burke’s work on the origin of life failed to gain the acceptance of those scientific experts with whom he had been on intimate terms. Having worked with J. J. Thomson, communicated with Soddy, interacted with Ramsay, and worked at the Cavendish Laboratory, he was viewed within the laboratory as having “caused a little amusement.”160 In a statement that reflects the internal politics at the Cavendish during his time there, Burke defended his work and his interpretations:

Nevertheless, a photograph of Burke with the rest of the group at the Cavendish shows him looking distinctly uncomfortable, seated with legs and arms crossed, and seemingly out of place with the confidence exuded by many of the other members of the group. Once an up-and-coming young scientist with publications on fluorescence and phosphorescence, published in Nature and other respected journals, within a few years Burke seemed impelled to flee the centers of scientific orthodoxy, leaving the academic spires behind to better publicize his work:

Burke left the Cavendish in 1906. While most others who had passed through the laboratory went on to academic careers in one form or another by 1910, Burke’s entry in A History of the Cavendish Laboratory indicated that in the time since his departure in 1906, he had been “engaged in literary and scientific pursuits.”163

The level of excitement at the Cavendish went down a notch with the start of the second decade of the twentieth century, as Thomson continued to hold to the vortex model of the atom, and especially as other laboratories in Paris (Curie) and Manchester (Rutherford) made more significant advances in radioactivity. Although the Cavendish “still carried out some important work between 1910 and 1914,” one historian of the laboratory has noted, “the Cavendish was losing vitality.”164 Soddy never publicly proclaimed his support for Burke’s findings, making only passing reference to Burke in his Annual Progress Report to the Chemical Society for 1906.165 Soddy came to support Rudge instead, and in time Soddy disavowed any close link with Burke’s experiments. Burke’s departure and the loss of vitality in radioactivity research at the Cavendish went hand in hand.

Burke’s departure in a minor key of ignominy was perhaps less the result of steady misrepresentation of his experiments and his claims—it is worth recalling Burke’s scathing refutations of Rudge’s failed attempts at replication—than of the sheer difficulty of arguing a complicated philosophical position on the nature of life as it may be or may once have been. This position proved to be too much for his contemporaries to handle, although they were able to appreciate nascent attempts at “synthetic biology” so long as these attempts stayed within the realm of mimicry and models. Such models might be useful for understanding the nature of growth or development, but were generally not useful for understanding metabolism and heredity (as Loeb had pointed out). To call any newly produced forms such as these “living” in any expanded sense was to pass the bounds not only of credibility, but even of pragmatic utility.

Conducting his experiments in the context of overwrought spontaneous generation debates, Burke was in the unenviable position of wanting to produce life but being unable to, and instead producing something that was neither fish nor fowl. Occupying an inherently unstable in-between space between physics and biology—a position he justified by an appeal to history and to the effacing effect of natural selection operating in both inorganic and organic evolution—Burke’s radiobes embodied a sophisticated claim. To his colleagues, however, radiobes were either physical phenomena or biological phenomena. As they were not the latter, they clearly had to be the former—although if the radiobes were to have anything to do with the nature and origin of life, they obviously had to be something more than just physical phenomena.166 Although he carefully positioned himself in a sort of limbo so as not to collapse the radiobes solely into the realm of either physics or biology, Burke’s efforts at historical nuance were lost on both physicists and biologists. Physicists were more than happy to make the radiobes into physical phenomena, while biologists—looking deeply askance at Burke’s ignorance of basic biological details—were all too happy to let them do so. Burke’s standing as a physicist and his stated intent to rescue biology from the ailing hands of biologists did little to help establish his claims among those entrusted with policing the meaning of “life.” Even with all the evolutionary discourse surrounding cosmic and organic evolution, living things, and radioactive phenomena, neither physicists nor biologists seemed keen on Burke’s claims.

Intriguingly, it was the popular science writer Saleeby who perhaps best realized the predicament of any firm response to Burke: “We must define life, and since no one need accept any one else’s definition of life, nor need adhere to his own any longer than he pleases, we are likely never to reach any possibility of returning a definite answer to the particular question concerning Mr. Burke’s radiobes.”167 The New York Times concurred:

Claims residing on this knife’s edge of “life as we have never known it” are destined to be rapidly designated as redundant and simply a part of physics, or as pseudoscience; benignly forgotten; or hailed as pathbreaking experiments that will become the foundation for a new field (but then fall into the physical or biological camp in short order). “Life as we have never known it” is an inherently unstable place to rest one’s research.169 Burke’s claims simply could not be allowed to remain problematic, because to do so would be to necessarily recognize the problematic character of the category of life itself. Better to forget that there was a problem. Better to forget about Burke. Better to forget about the radiobes.

A few years after Burke’s work, Sir Edward Schäfer delivered his presidential address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, where he raised the issue of the status of research into the origin of life. Though Schäfer called for further investigation into lifelike phenomena, Burke’s work was not mentioned. Burke’s role in inaugurating a new experimental approach to the historical origin of life was effectively forgotten only a few short years after his name had resounded across the world. As the New York Times reported on the meeting, “Many differences of opinion were revealed in the debate, but on one point there was complete agreement—that we are no nearer a solution of the problem than we were a thousand years ago.”170

Nevertheless, Burke’s legacy of theorizing and experimentally producing “precursors” of living things remained. Some “first steps” were soon announced, including Benjamin Moore’s synthesis of organic compounds from inorganic starting ingredients, as well as the discovery that a mixture of colloids, water, and carbon dioxide “in the presence of uranium salt” would produce formaldehyde, “the simplest organic structure” and “the first step in the evolution of life.” Without claims to have produced something half-living, but certainly having produced something organic from a radioactive element (and in circumstances distinctly different from those of Wöhler’s synthesis of urea in 1828), the experimental search for precursors to the first living thing had begun in earnest.171

Indeed, the “precursor” approach formed the heart of origin-of-life studies for decades to come. Burke’s inaugural experiments thus undoubtedly place him as one of the pioneers, if not the pioneer, of an experimental approach to the question of the historical origin of life on earth. Whatever the accuracy or longevity of Burke’s particular theories about radium and life, his work was undoubtedly a powerful stimulus to the experimental study of the origin of life, and his experiments opened the door for the later and perhaps more familiar origin-of-life theories and experiments of figures such as Aleksandr Oparin and J. B. S. Haldane.172

Off the Deep End

Burke’s private fortune ensured that he was able to move on to other activities, to the point that his youthful indiscretions with radium were conveniently forgotten. Something of a self-made polymath later in life, Burke lived the good life in London, at 63 St. James (just around the corner from Christie’s), and in northern Italy, at his villa in Merano. He was reported to have spoken eight languages and came to be widely known as a “physicist, inventor, and scientific author.” By 1924 he had become best known for his work on automatic typewriters, new methods of typesetting, and automatic printing of telephone messages. By and large, he had left “life” behind, with the sole exception of a curiously impenetrable book entitled The Emergence of Life: Being a Treatise on Mathematical Philosophy and Symbolic Logic by Which a New Theory of Space and Time Is Evolved, published alongside a popularized version entitled Mystery of Life in 1931.173

For Burke, the origin of life had been equivalent to the fundamental mystery of the origin of matter: “The mystery of both still remains where it was, the inconceivable, impenetrable, source and nucleus of our being, which lies hidden for ever from us. I can find in that remote immutable and distant origin which loses itself in infinity of space as well as of time the only origin not merely of life but of mind.”174 This equation of life with nonlife with mind—which “implies and even demands that atoms and molecules are thinking and alive”175—took Burke down increasingly bizarre roads. His The Emergence of Life was described by one reviewer in the history of science as little more than a “curious mixture of the metaphysics of monadology and the mathematical methods of symbolic logic,” that yet somehow managed to incorporate “the philosophies of Kant, Schelling, and Hegel into this symbolic language”—a striking example of a physicist stark mad in metaphysics if there ever was one.176 Burke’s obituary was considerably kinder, generously calling these latter exercises “richly eclectic, openly professing a synthesis of the Platonic theory of ideas with Leibnitz’s monadology and with the mathematics of relativity and modern theory of numbers. . . . The greatest value of the book lay, perhaps, in its demonstration of the heuristic value of mathematics in philosophical investigation.”177

Burke had gone right off the deep end, even claiming at one point in the book that “it can be shown that the phenomena of karyokinesis or sub-division of the nucleus can be explained by the theory of relativity.”178 But by this time Burke had company. Among others in the 1920s, the Russian-born naturalized Frenchman Georges Lakhovsky had compared the nucleus of a cell to an electrical oscillating circuit, calling the interaction between a living thing and microbes a “war of radiations” and characterizing health as an “oscillatory equilibrium.” (According to Lakhovsky’s translator, “The foundations of Lakhovsky’s theories rest on the principle that life is created by radiation and maintained by radiation.”) The American surgeon George Crile, on the other hand, “whose great work on surgical shock has earned him an international reputation,” was reported to have argued that “man is a radio-electrical mechanism and stresses the significant fact that when life ends, radiation ends.”179 Both espoused theories of radiation produced by and emanating from living things—radiogen for Crile and biomagnomobile for Lakhovsky. While in his Secret of Life, Lakhovsky held that life was created and maintained by radiation and “destroyed by oscillatory disequilibrium,” Crile’s two books—A Bipolar Theory of Life (1926) and The Phenomena of Life: A Radio-Electric Interpretation (1936)—endeavored to rework contemporary notions of the proper reach and course of biophysics. Meanwhile, a Becquerel of another time and place drew on the discursive storehouse of radium to propose a theory of life’s origins all his own in 1925: “Did the radiations from radium minerals, which have either stimulant or deadening power on vital processes . . . once act in just such proportion and under just such circumstances that the chemical atoms combined into living protoplasm?”180 Plus ça change . . .

Burke made one last attempt in his final works to shore up his reputation in origin-of-life studies—one final attempt in 1931 to clarify just what he had tried to do:

For Burke, the creation of artificial life in the laboratory—by which he meant precursors to living things or to things that might not traditionally have been considered living, and not the immediate production of a living thing itself—was one and the same with an attempt to investigate the historical origin of life in the laboratory.

But Burke, perhaps aware that his reputation in the matter was beyond salvage, finally gave up on thinking that either his experiments or his thought experiments could help him get at both the nature and the origin of life. In fact, he argued, a distinction needed to be made between the two:

Burke himself had reached a point of mere nescience on the matter, or, as he declared elsewhere in the book, “Life is what IS.”

Burke died shortly after publishing these final remarks. Not even the vitalizing power of radium could save him. His obituary made no mention of the radiobes that had made him famous in his youth.183

: : :

Sitting at the intersection of a discourse of living atoms and atoms of life, reworking preexisting traditions ranging from Naturphilosophie to crystal analogies, deeply embedded in studies of the phenomena of phosphorescence, bioluminescence, and radioactivity, and weaving radium into the history of life on the early earth, Burke’s work explicitly linked the previously separate discourses of cosmic and organic evolution for the first time with concrete experiment. His work not only proved pivotal in the redefining of “spontaneous generation” in the Anglophone context, but also served as a founding moment in the history of experimental research into the origin of life. Revealed at the height of the radium craze, his findings also demonstrate the rapid sedimentation of vitalistic metaphors of radium into a novel and provocative experimental system that relied as much on metaphor, metaphysics, and careful philosophy as on petri dishes and test tubes. These connections between radium and life proved more than merely metaphorical and more than airily metaphysical. Not just reminiscent of life, radium reached its apotheosis in experimentally vitalizing matter.

Moreover, despite Burke’s failure, his work had pushed the realm of biological possibility for radium to its limits. The half-life of these connections between radium and life would play out in ever more concrete ways over the succeeding decades. New experimental systems emerged out of the same generative metaphorical and metaphysical hot dilute soup that had spawned the radiobes, each with its own life history and each interacting in its own ways with the ongoing conceptual, technical, and technological changes that were driving the transmutation of the associations between radium and life still further.

One prominent botanical investigator working early in the twentieth century roundly criticized Burke’s work as ridiculous, but felt compelled to ask, if radium could not be used to effect life, could it nevertheless affect life? Radium’s powers were soon to be tapped in the quest to gain control over the very processes of evolution itself.