by
Melinda Pillsbury-Foster
The
first showing of a microscopic motion picture took place in a small,
make-shift basement laboratory at U. C. Berkeley in 1926 . All of the
U. C. instructors who could had crowded themselves in to the cramped
space.
They
were there, wrote
Arthur C. Pillsbury ten years later in his book,
“Miracles of Plant and Animal Life,”
“ to see the results and I was very anxious to get their reactions.
After the short showing was over, Dr. Setchell turned to Dr. Holman
and said, “What have we just seen, Doctor?”
Startled,
Dr. Setchell talked about Brownic movements in protoplasm. The theory
of pseudo-random motion came from botanist Robert
Brown in 1827. Brown noted particles moved through the water.
Unable to determine the mechanisms causing this motion it was assumed
these were random and not purposeful.
What
the UC instructors had seen on the screen was a cell dividing.
There
was nothing random about it, as science eventually accepted.
Pillsbury did not wait to hear anyone else's opinion. Knowing he
needed the best equipment to continue his work he placed an order for
what he needed. He then started out on a lecture tour to pay for it.
The first unit cost $5,000, an enormous sum in 1926. To ensure these
insights would remain available Pillsbury refused to patent his
invention, instead publishing instructions for building your own
camera.
Pillsbury
said in his book, describing what he had seen in his study of Spyder
Lily pollen as it germinated. “No
matter what the obstruction, they grew over and under it or pushed it
to one side.” Pillsbury
continued, “ the
nucleus, the germ of life, as it came out of the grain, traveled down
the tube and entered the stigma. To ponder the reason, the why and
wherefore, of nature's struggles to carry on, the difficulties to
overcome, make one realize that the Guiding Hand must control all
life, that one cannot well be a student of life and an atheist.”
The
insights provided must have been unwelcome on college campuses where
atheism and Marxism were gaining credibility for ideas covertly
funded by the largest, and wealthiest, corporations on Earth.
These
insights, with implications for all science, could not be contained.
The explosion in discoveries gives mute testimony to what scientists
refused to ignore.
In
November, 1927, a fire in Pillsbury's studio destroyed his ability to
fund another such project.
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