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— ABIOGENESIS —
OR, THE FRANKENSTEIN EFFECT
by John Mount © 1999
— ABIOGENESIS — reported to the local constabulary, seeing
OR, THE FRANKENSTEIN EFFECT ceric flashing lights and hearing weird
by John Mount © 1999 crackling, hissing noises coming from
Crosse's house during the night and well
uring work on an electrical experi - into the wee hours. It was this type of phe-
Dm an astonished scientist nomenon that eventually earned Crosse the
found that he had accidentally cre - title, "the Thunder and Lightning Man".
ated life. This is the story of what he dis- During the autumn of 1837, Crosse was
covered over 150 years ago—and more... busy trying to synthesise crystals of silica
Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, science _ by passing a continuous weak current from
was busy trying to replicate the primitive Leyden condensers and galvanic batteries
pre-life conditions that were supposedly through oxide of iron, whilst a fluid medi-
responsible for the early beginnings of life um of silicate of potash and hydrochloric
on this planet. In laboratories around the acid was allowed to seep gradually through
world, white-coated priests of this religion the iron. (It is interesting to note that Dr
nouveau subjected their test tubes, contain- Wilhelm Reich, during experiments in the
ing a multitude of weird and wonderful 1930s and 1940s with substances he called
concoctions, to heat and electric current, _"bion fluids", suggested that ic electrici-
whilst muttering strange incantations with _ ty like that in Leyden jars was similar to, if
words like "amino acids" and "chromo- _ not the same power as, his "orgone energy"
somes" as they vainly tried to coax life which he believed was the "fundamental
from their primordial soups and stews. phenomenon of life".)
However, there is a possibility that the For two weeks, Crosse patiently awaited
answer to the question of the origin of life the results of the experiment. The forma-
on Earth may have surfaced well over a __ tion of crystals as he had expected was not
hundred years previously in an old house in immediately forthcoming, but something
the English countryside. much more unusual and unexpected began
Publication of successful experiments to occur. In his diary, Crosse described the
performed by a solitary experimenter __ results of his experiment:
around the 1830s was suppressed at the On the fourteenth day from the
time, though two other researchers (one of
them the electrical luminary Michael
Faraday) later claimed similar results. >
Andrew Crosse, in the year 1836, would Ce YO cl
have been known by his peers as "an elec-