[Are liquid crystals living organisms?].

In 1888 the Austrian botanist F. Reinitzer made the observation that the solid compound cholesteryl-benzoate changes - when melting at 145.5 oC - into a cloudy liquid, that however, turns into a clear liquid at 178.5 oC and higher temperatures. The cloudy liquid seemed to be doubly refracting. Soon a number of these so-called 'liquid crystals' were discovered; in 1908 D. Vorländer, professor of organic chemistry at Halle, described more than 250 of these substances. It was O. Lehmann, professor of physics at Aachen (1885), Dresden (1888) and Karlsruhe (1889), who immediately after Reinitzer's observation began a systematic study of these liquid crystals. In The Netherlands the Amsterdam professor of physican chemistry H. W. Bakhuis Roozeboom was interested in liquid crystals, in particular because of their place in his phase system. F.M. Jaeger, at that time teaching chemistry in a secondary school in Zaandam (near Amsterdam) and working as an unpaid university lecturer at the Amsterdam university (by recommendation of Bakhuis Roozeboom), investigated liquid crystals (1906), as did a number of doctoral students (A.C. de Kock, 1903; A. Prins, 1907). At the university of Utrecht L.S. Ornstein, professor of physics, gave the study of liquid crystals a prominent place in his research programme. The discovery of liquid crystals, which seemed to be able to grow, move, divide, copulate, and so on, led to a discussion on the nature of these substances. Time and again Lehmann called them 'apparently living crystals', although without considering them as 'real living beings'. In his book Flüssige Kristalle und die Theorien des Lebens (1906), Lehmann proved to be an obvious adherent of the monistic views of the biologist E. Haeckel. Haeckel considered the existence of liquid crystals as proof of the unity between the inorganic and the organic world that he believed in so strongly. In his last book, Kristallseelen. Studien über das Anorganische Leben (1917), he considered liquid crystals a real form of life, as did F. Rinne, professor of mineralogy and petrography, as late as in the nineteen thirties.