The Nature of Organizing Action

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Abstract
The address is general or theoretical, and emphasizes the concept of life as essentially a process of synthesis and integration.[long dash]In the organizing process (e.g., in any ontogeny) materials randomly distributed in the environment are assembled and unified to form the living animal or plant. This integrative process presupposes (1) constancy in the properties and modes of interaction of the materials and (2) constancy in the activity of the special vital factors which control or direct the integration. These vital factors, while dependent for their effective operation on the constancy of physical units and physical modes of action, are not to be identified completely with purely physical factors. They appear to include directive or synthesizing factors ("creative" factors) of a kind specifically vital. In living organisms the historical background is all-important. The present organization of any species is a record of factors acting progressively and cumulatively in the past. Hering''s comparison between individual memory and "germinal memory" is discussed. The evidence indicates that the specific stereochemical configuration of certain nuclear proteins (gene proteins), which has been fixed during the biochemical evolution of the species, is the essential factor controlling the special course of the metabolic reactions which build up the developing organism (formative metabolism). Since these proteins are stable in their chemical constitution, and reduplicate themselves in every nuclear division, the course of the morphogenesis which they control is correspondingly constant and specific. The analogies between genes and ultraviruses are pointed out, and there follows a brief discussion of the possible relations between protein structure and the determinative role ascribed to genes in development.

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