SPECIAL REVIEWS

AN INQUIRY INTO COMMON DENOMINATORS OF CELLULAR PHYSIOLOGY

¹ The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (Department of Pediatrics, School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania), Philadelphia.

Editors: JOSEPH STOKES JR., M.D..

A study has been made of the known phenomena which affect the biologic organism. Certain correlations have been found and other correlations are logically inferred. The common grounds of anatomic structures, the anatomic responses to endocrine stimuli, the interrelationships and interdependencies of the endocrines and external stimuli have been followed and have been related to cellular permeability and hyaluronic acid. Cellular phases, including the rhythmic alternations in physiologic functions, have been delineated and their importance stressed. Further, the probability is advanced that this rhythmicity originates physiologically in the brain but that the brain itself is capable of receiving transmissions from within and without the body, and disseminating them, again rhythmically, in normal or altered amplitude and frequency.

Further experimental evidence of these correlations and their practical extrapolations into drug actions and the therapy of infections and metabolic disease will be reported and will include clinical, animal and in vitro studies.

At present, the following conclusions seem justified:

1. No component of the body is capable of independent action.

2. Action in any component is reflected, according to its magnitude and directness of application, upon all the body.

3. All such actions are mediated by the brain.

4. There is a dynamic, rhythmic cyclicity in physiologic action which can be altered in amplitude and frequency.

5. These rhythms are alternations of cellular tenseness and relaxation.

6. The concomitants of the tense phase are compactness, impermeability, electric conductivity and contraction of all cells, and these characteristics might be described collectively as the factors operative in maturing the cell. The concomitants of the relaxed phase are laxness, permeability, electric resistance and expansion of all cells and are factors of growth.

7. The phase of tenseness is accompanied by an increase in certain hormonal activities and that of relaxation by an increase in others.

8. The hormones may be causes of the phase or the results of it.

9. Infectious disease cannot act as an extraneous agent capable of bringing its own engine into such a highly integrated mechanism but must act on the body through its ability to affect one of the body's mechanisms.

10. Drugs must act through the same channels available to disease.

11. Foods may contain, in addition to their caloric content, components capable of stimulating either the phase of cellular expansion or cellular compaction, particularly foods from the reproductive systems of plants or animals (milk, eggs, cereal, for example).

12. Vitamins each stimulate one phase and should be evaluated in terms of positive actions.

13. Inherent growth and maturation factors are not of fixed capacity in an individual but beyond certain limits must be supplied him or applied to him constantly.

14. The hormone most manifest in the tense phase is estrogen and so may be considered the maturation factor, and the one most manifest in the phase of relaxation or cell division is progesterone, which may be considered the growth factor.

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