β Scribed by E.U. Condon
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Considerable attention has been paid recently to the possibility that the quantum nature of the light absorption process may play an important role in the mechanism whereby unicellular or other simple organisms are killed by ultra-violet and x-radiation. Some interesting experimental results in this direction have just been reported by Swann and de1 Rosario l from the Bartol Research Foundation and by others whose work is cited in their paper.
But there has been, it seems to me, an unfortunate neglect of the proper literature citations in regard to the theoretical ideas in this field. Actually although a footnote in the paper just cited says that "the senior author . , . is also responsible for the theoretical treatment," the credit for first working out these ideas seems to be due to Crowther.2 He developed the essential details of the picture as used by later workers and applied it to some observations on the killing of Colfiidium Colpoda by x-rays. Here the experiments, interpreted by the statistical theory, indicated that a large number of quanta (about 50) need to be absorbed by one organism to cause death, so the quantum nature of the phenomena is not much in evidence.
Independently in 1927 the writer and H. M. Terrill developed the same theory and applied it to data secured by Packard in the cancer research institute of Columbia University on the killing of Drosophila eggs by x-rays. The paper 3 appeared in the spring of 1928 although the journal was dated
π SIMILAR VOLUMES
We show that when the nature of the preparation and observation processes are included in the quantum mechanical descrlptlon of intramolecular energy transfer, HeUer's argument for the nonergodlcity of Isolated degenerate quantum