Revisiting the mitogenetic effect of ultra-weak photon emission

Since the conditions were unknown, the induction length should have been tried at least up to 2 h. In “positive” works it was always carefully optimized.

In Wolf and Ras (1933) it was 2 × 104 cells/ml; in Ferguson and Rahn (1933) the recipient culture was diluted to 50–5000 cells/ml; no effect was obtained on more dense cultures.

The work was done under very low light (“in a room without windows …[with] a 25-watt globe, contained in a dark green or dark brown bottle.”

This is a good way to standardize the light conditions, which were rather unclear from Gurwitsch's publications. Still, in most “positive” works it was definitely lighter in the room, with only specific precautions against artificial UV.

Thus, most of the conditions were new, and never checked before. The authors took a lot of doubtful precautions, but didn't optimize the conditions of primary importance (the culture age, the induction start and duration, the medium content, the light conditions). Besides, some of them were definitely against previous recommendations (the culture age, the thickness of the recipient layer).

Critical works were also published by Nakaidzumi and Schreiber (1931), Kreuchen and Bateman (1932) and Westenberg (1935).

In all of them principal deviations from the methods recommended in “positive works” were made.

In Nakaidzumi and Schreiber (1931) yeast cultures 9–12 h old (at 25°C) were used as recipient. This corresponds to exponential phase, which was long known incompetent to show MGE (see Section Methods of Observing MGE).

In Kreuchen and Bateman (1932) the recipient culture was taken in too high concentrations (at which no MGE can be obtained either), and the intensity of (artificial) mitogentic inductor was ~104 times higher than recommended in Chariton et al. (1930) (see Section Can UPE Transfer Information?).

Unfortunately we didn't have a chance to see the works of Westenberg in original. Still, they were much less influential, and their methodic was criticized in detail in a number of works (see Gurwitsch and Gurwitsch, 1948).

The works on MGE mostly stopped in 1940-s, except several groups in the USSR (Konev et al., 1963, 1966; Gurwitsch, 1968) and some groups continuing studies on cancer diagnostics. Pesochensky defended a Dr. Sci. dissertation “The phenomenon of <MGE> quenching at cancer and pre-cancer diseases” (Pesochensky, 1942) in Leningrad in 1942, during the Siege. Gurwitsch was evacuated from Leningrad in 1941, and became the head of a new institute in Moscow. Yet, he was assailed by Lysenko during his company vs. genetics etc…and although remained at large, was devoid of his lab and any opportunity for research work. He was several times nominated for the Nobel Prize (“Nomination Database: Alexander Gurwitsch”), and awarded the Stalin prize in 1941.

The topic of nonchemical interactions was “revisited” later by a number of authors, mostly in the USSR. A more than 20 years research was performed by Kaznacheev et al. in 1960–1980-s. The authors showed that cytopatic effect induced in a cell culture by viruses or toxic chemicals, could be “transferred” to another (recipient) cell culture, chemically separated but optically coupled with the first one. A huge amount of work by this group, including seasonal changes in the effect, analysis of reproducibility etc…, was summarized in Kaznacheev and Mikhailova (1981). Similar works were performed by Kirkin (1981), and later by Nikolaev (Nikolaev, 2000; Beloussov et al., 2007), Burlakov (Burlakov et al., 2000), Beloussov (Beloussov et al., 1997, 2000), Trushin (2004) and others (we apologize to those not mentioned) (For recent reviews see, Trushin, 2003; Cifra et al., 2011; Scholkmann et al., 2013).

In 1970-s–1990-s a serious set of works connected to MGE, was published by Quickenden et al. The authors detected significant photon emission from growing yeast cultures, in both visible and UV spectral range (see below), but couldn't obtain biological MGE (Quickenden and Tilbury, 1985). Here we summarize their technical details (see Section Methods of Observing MGE for more details and quotation):

The recipient culture was (1) in stationary (G0) phase (10 days-old in a rich growth medium at 28°C and oxygen saturation) or (2) in lag-phase—just after seeding the former (G0) culture in fresh medium.

It was clearly shown in “early works,” that no MGE was observed in G0. The culture should be either post-diauxic, or plated from such one, with the induction start depending on its age.

The cultures used, were (1) suspension, (2) bubbled with oxygen and (3) at 28°C, which is all much better physiologically, but totally different from the conditions of early works.

The induction started immediately after (or immediately before) plating the recipient in fresh medium.

The induction start is one of principal parameters for MGE observation, and should be optimized for the culture age used. Besides, the older the inoculum culture, the later the induction should start. Here the recipient culture is much older than any one used before, and the induction start is the earliest possible.

It should be optimized at least in the diapason 1–120 min for each new conditions.

Thus, the conditions used in these works were totally new, and never checked for MGE before. None of principally important parameters of the experiment were optimized (or even checked for the effect), and a number of conditions were not applicable for MGE at all (the method of induction, and probably the culture age).

A work by Wainwright et al. (1997) was also done under absolutely new conditions, but the authors were lucky to obtain a good effect. Unfortunately, they could not make it reproducible (probably because of the new and not optimized conditions). The same can be said about the works by Musumeci et al. (Grasso et al., 1991).

Contrary to natural expectations, only a small part of numerous studies performed in several labs headed by Alexander Gurwitsch and later by his daughter, Prof. Anna Gurwitsch, was devoted to the study of the “basic MGE.” In most cases, the effect was used as a refined tool for non-invasive and immediate detection of a large number of physiological and biochemical processes taking place in normal and pathologically modified cells and tissues (Worth mentioning, most of these labs were affiliated to medical bodies). To make this possible, spectral analysis of MGE was widely used, and its modification, the so called selective scattering of external UV by biological and chemical samples, was elaborated (Gurwitsch and Gurwitsch, 1947).

The reported results can be reviewed here only in broad outlines. A substantial bulk of investigations was dealing with neural excitation and brain tissue activity (Gurvich, 1937; Gurwitsch and Gurwitsch, 1959). The authors showed propagation of MGE activity along the excited nerve fiber going with the rate of electric impulse (Gurwitsch, 1934; Gurvich, 1937). They also reported that MGE spectra of nerves depended on the nature of exciting agents. In another series of experiments flashes of photon emission (called “degradational radiation”) were detected immediately after application of stressful agents (see Gurwitsch and Gurwitsch, 1945).

In all these cases spectral analysis of MGE revealed a number of fast and as a rule reversible reactions (undetectable by standard physiological and biochemical methods). The authors related these reactions to formation and/or destruction of what they called “non-equilibrium molecular constellations” (i.e., excited supermolecular associations, Gurwitsch and Gurwitsch, 1948). Thus, they previewed the existence and the biological role of activated metastable complexes, their delocalized electron-excited states (e.g., in photosynthesis) and other phenomena called dissipative structures.

Applications of such “MGE-research” to the problem of malignant growth is of an excessive interest. It was first discovered that tumors were very active MGE inductors (Gurwitsch and Gurwitsch, 1945). At the same time, blood of cancer patients (contrary to that of healthy people) stopped emitting mitogenetic radiation at the earliest stages of malignization, long before any histological signs (Siebert, 1930; Pesochensky, 1942, 1947). The authors attributed this phenomenon to secretion of a specific protein, which they called “cancer quencher.” This discovery was successfully used for early diagnosis of cancer diseases in 1930–1940-s not only in the USSR (Gurwitsch and Salkind, 1929; Pesochensky, 1942, 1947), but also in Germany (Siebert, 1930). The reported statistics of the coincidences between data from such “MGE-diagnostics” and standard diagnostic methods is impressive (see Pesochensky, 1947). However, later this method was forgotten. Yet, it is quite obvious that cancer pathology is such an important problem that none of its details, whether they are of practical purpose today or not, should be missed.

From the very first works on MGE, physical qualities of its mediator were among central problems of research. According to (Gurwitsch, 1924; Reiter and Gabor, 1928b; Siebert and Seffert, 1933), they are identical to those of extremely weak UV:

The MGE-inducing factor can pass through quartz (of high purity) or very thin layers of glass or water (25 μm);

It cannot pass through thick glass plates, gelatin, or any non-transparent materials.

In further investigations “spectra” of MGE were obtained by separating the inductor and a set of recipients with a prism (Reiter and Gabor, 1928a) or a monochromator (Frank, 1929; Kannegiesser, 1931). Spectra published by Gurwitsch's school belong to the area 190–250 nm, those by Reiter and Gabor—330–340 nm (For discussion of spectral properties see, Gurwitsch and Gurwitsch, 1934; Hollaender, 1936; Rahn, 1936).

The first attempts to measure “mitogenetic radiation” with physical devices, were made with the use of photographic plates (Reiter and Gabor, 1928b; Taylor and Harvey, 1931), and later with photoelectric chambers (Chariton et al., 1930; Schreiber and Friedrich, 1930). The results were either negative (Taylor and Harvey, 1931) or inconsistent (Reiter and Gabor, 1928b).