The Fitness of the Environment; an Inquiry Into the Biological Significance of the Properties of Matter
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Lawrence Joseph Henderson was an American biochemist, physiologist and scientist. He served as a professor of biological chemistry, and later professor of chemistry at Harvard University. As a biochemist he discovered the chemical means by which acid-base equilibria are maintained in nature.
Background
Lawrence Joseph Henderson was born on June 3, 1878 in Lynn, Massachussets, United States. He was the oldest child of Joseph Henderson, a commission merchant, and Mary Reed (Bosworth) Henderson. His father was a native of Salem, Massachussets His mother, whose grandparents had moved west to Pittsburgh and thence to Ohio, where she was born, had met Joseph Henderson during a visit to relatives on the East Coast. A woman of marked ability and independence of character, she had been reared in a strongly Calvinistic family but became quite detached from organized religion. Lawrence grew up with two younger brothers; three other brothers, one a twin of Lawrence's, died in infancy.
The family was prosperous in his early years, though less so after the depression of 1893, which affected Joseph Henderson's business severely. Of his upbringing Henderson later wrote: "I acquired in childhood and have preserved many of the standards of a respectable, old-fashioned Yankee, and perhaps still more a deep feeling that the pattern of behavior with which these sentiments correspond is the decent and respectable way to live. "
Education
As a boy Henderson attended public schools in Salem, Massachussets, where he excelled in physics. He entered Harvard College in 1894, at the age of sixteen, and received the degree of Bachelor of Arts magna cum laude in 1898.
In science, he took a particularly active interest in physics and physical chemistry; as a result of an accidental observation in the laboratory he undertook a research problem under the guidance of Professor Theodore W. Richards, the results of which were published in a German journal. Courses in philosophy and in French literature also roused his interest. At the end of his sophomore year he rigged up a primitive chemical laboratory and gave a six-week intensive course in elementary chemistry to his brother Harry, whose schoolwork had been delayed by illness for a year; he always considered this one of his most valuable experiences.
Wishing to learn biochemistry, Henderson entered the Harvard Medical School in 1898. There he worked with a great deal of independence, devoting only the barely necessary amount of time to some of the routine courses that did not interest him, living at the university in Cambridge, and associating chiefly with nonmedical friends. After receiving the Doctor of Medicine degree cum laude in 1902, he made no attempt to practice medicine but went abroad for two years to work in the famous laboratory of Franz Hofmeister in Strassburg.
He received honorary degrees from the universities of Cambridge and Grenoble.
Career
When Henderson returned to the United States in the fall of 1904, he went to work in Richards’ laboratory at Harvard. In 1905 Henderson was appointed lecturer in biochemistry at Harvard, where he continued to teach until his death.
Henderson’s broad outlook led him to write on philosophy and sociology as well as science. In spite of the diversity of his interests, however, his work, in retrospect, exhibits a fundamental unity. There is a marked consistency in his approach to the various fields that he studied. During the course of his research, he became impressed with the need for studying the interaction between the variables of a system and with the apparent orderliness of certain systems. His career was largely devoted to the study of the organization of the organism, the universe, and society. The emphasis in his work was always on the importance of examining whole systems.
Henderson reflected as well as contributed to an organismic, holistic trend which played an important role in the thought of the early twentieth century. The character of this trend is exemplified by such philosophies as Alfred North Whitehead’s organic mechanism, Jan Smuts’s holism, and the theory of emergent evolution as expounded by C. Lloyd Morgan. Organismic and holistic influences entered the social and natural sciences through the development of the functionalist school in anthropology, the gestalt theory in psychology, and organismic biology.
In his early work Henderson applied his knowledge of physical chemistry to the problem of acid-base equilibrium in the body. It was then known that the body fluids are excellent buffers, that is, they resist changes in acidity or basicity, and that this buffering ability depends upon the presence of weak acids (or bases) and their salts. Henderson derived an equation which allowed him to describe quantitatively the action of buffer solutions. This equation was converted into logarithmic form by the Danish biochemist K. A. Hasselbalch in 1916 and is now known as the Henderson-Hasselbalch equation. Although only approximately true, it still remains the most useful mathematical device for treating problems dealing with buffer solutions.
Henderson’s equation made it clear that a weak acid and its salt act most effectively as a buffer at a hydrogen ion concentration equal to the acid’s dissociation constant. This fact explains why carbonic acid and monosodium phosphate, along with their salts, act so efficiently in preserving the approximate neutrality of the body. These acids have dissociation constants of about 10-7 moles per liter, which means that they serve as excellent buffers for blood and many other physiological fluids, in which the hydrogen ion concentration is close to the same number of moles per liter.
This work greatly impressed Henderson with the “fitness” of substances like carbonic acid for various physiological processes. At about this time (1908), he became friendly with Josiah Royce and began to attend his philosophy seminars at Harvard. With Henderson’s interest in philosophical problems thus stimulated, he proceeded to speculate further concerning the fitness of the inorganic environment to support life. In two books, The Fitness of the Environment (1913) and The Order of Nature (1917), he concluded that the properties of carbon dioxide, water, and carbon compounds (which he considered to be the chief constituents of the environment as far as the organism is concerned) and the properties of the elements carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen uniquely favor the evolution of complex physicochemical systems such as living beings. He could not believe that this correspondence between the properties of matter and energy and the characteristics of physicochemical systems could be due to chance. He concluded that a kind of order, or teleology, exists in nature and that the origin of this order cannot be explained in mechanistic terms. The universe has to be viewed from two complementary points of view, mechanism and “teleology” (a word which Henderson used to denote order or harmonious unity rather than design or purpose).
While he was speculating on the order of nature, Henderson was also considering the organization of the body. His studies on the complex buffer systems of the organism and on acidosis contributed greatly to the understanding of these subjects and served to focus his attention on the pattern or order of the organism. According to Henderson, the organism, like nature, had to be considered from two points of view, namely mechanism and organization. The structures and processes of the living being, which are the things that are organized, are in themselves mechanical. The concept of organization, however, is not mechanical but is a rational and teleological relationship between these parts and processes.
As far as the physiologist is concerned, Henderson felt, the investigation of biological organization basically meant the elucidation of the regulatory processes of the body, for example, the mechanisms regulating the acid-base balance which he had elaborated. In this connection, he later came to see Claude Bernard’s theory of the constancy of the internal environment as an important and concrete expression of biological organization.
Henderson believed that the concept of organization taught the biologist to recognize the wholeness of the organism and the interdependence of its parts and processes. When he began his study of blood in 1919, he was convinced that every one of the variables involved in the respiratory changes of blood must be a mathematical function of all the others. As data was collected in his laboratory on the relations between the various components of blood, such as the carbon dioxide tension and oxygen, Henderson searched for a graphic device to describe the interrelations between a number of variables. Quite accidentally he stumbled upon the Cartesian nomogram, which is essentially a complex graph made by superimposing two or more simpler graphs.
He began with five experimentally determined equations involving the seven variables which he felt were necessary to explain the respiratory activity of blood. Each of these equations was expressed in terms of two independent variables, free oxygen and free carbon dioxide. A two-dimensional graph can be plotted for each of these equations, and these graphs can be combined into one figure since they all have the same Cartesian coordinates. This technique allowed him to represent all seven variables in one diagram. Each point on the nomogram has seven coordinates, so that if the value of any two variables is known, the values of the other five can be read off the chart. Henderson later learned how to transform these complex nomograms into the type of alignment chart invented by P. M. D’Ocagne, which was much easier to read. After Henderson introduced the nomogram into biology, it proved to be a useful tool for facilitating the visualization of relations between several variables, as well as for saving a great deal of computation. His description of the blood as a physicochemical system was summarized in his classic book Blood: A Study in General Physiology (1928).
While Henderson was writing this work, his colleague William Morton Wheeler introduced him to Vilfredo Pareto’s Trattato di sociolgia generate (1916). Henderson was very much impressed by the attempt of this Italian engineer-turned-social scientist to apply the methods of the physical sciences to sociology. Pareto’s treatment of society as a system in dynamic equilibrium, similar to the organism, appealed to Henderson, who believed that society, like the body, is an organized system which possesses regulatory processes that tend to stabilize it. This doctrine, which he taught in his sociology course at Harvard, influenced the thought of such men as George Homans, Talcott Parsons, and Crane Brinton.
He died on February 10, 1942.
Achievements
Henderson was known as one of the leading biochemists of the early 20th century. He found that the formation of carbonic acid from carbon dioxide and water in the presence of the salt of the acid (bicarbonates) is the only naturally occurring system, with the exception of phosphate solutions, that maintains a neutral acid-base equilibrium. The chemical expression developed by Henderson, and modified by the Danish biochemist Karl Hasselbach, to describe these systems, now known as the Henderson-Hasselbach equation, is of fundamental importance to biochemistry.
His contributions to Harvard University during his career as a were many and varied. He was instrumental in the founding of the department of physical chemistry in the medical school (1920), the fatigue laboratory in the Graduate School of Business Administration (1927), and the Society of Fellows (1932). The first course at Harvard dealing with the history of the sciences in general was offered by Henderson beginning in 1911. He was also largely responsible for bringing George Sarton to Cambridge in 1916.
Among the honors that Henderson received were membership in the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the French Legion of Honor.
As an agnostic, Henderson did not draw any religious or theological conclusions from his consideration of fitness. J. D. Bernal has pointed out that facts cited by Henderson can be taken as evidence that life has to make do with what it has or it would not be here at all, rather than as an indication of some master plan in nature. Henderson’s lasting contribution was to make it clear that the inorganic world has placed certain restrictions on the direction that organic evolution can take.
Views
In his later years, particularly after reading Pareto, Henderson grew increasingly skeptical of metaphysics and came to regret the tone of certain parts of his earlier works. Although he never rejected the concept of fitness, he felt that the philosophical speculations which he had derived from this notion were meaningless. He preferred to regard the apparent existence of fitness as a basic but inexplicable fact and to speculate no further on the subject. He became fully convinced that science is only approximate, not absolute. All metaphysical statements, such as “the external world really exists, ” he considered nonlogical and hence meaningless for science.
Membership
From 1936 until the end of his life Henderson was foreign secretary of the National Academy of Sciences, and did much to promote relations with the scientists of Western Europe, especially of Great Britain.
Personality
A stout man with a red beard (which earned him the nickname of "Pink Whiskers"), Henderson loved good food and French wines. In conversation he could be quite forceful and enjoyed making dogmatic statements that stimulated his audience to respond. The code of behavior of the respectable, hard-working, thrifty Yankee guided his conduct throughout his life. In his scientific work, his strength lay in the interpretation of data and in the discovery of uniformities and generalizations. He was not a proficient experimenter, and he disliked the manipulation of complicated apparatus.
In the words of an associate, Dickinson Richards, Henderson was "a stoutish man of middle stature, " with "light thinning red hair and a red beard, graying as the years moved on.
His eyes were wide and very blue, his cheeks pink, his expression in repose a little surprised, in his earlier years even a little cherubic. " His voice was high-pitched, perhaps as a result of a nearly fatal attack of diphtheria in childhood. He loved discussion and would often maintain his position with great force and sometimes with strong emotion.
His mind and temperament were complex. Especially in his later years, he spoke often with intense distrust of "intellectuals, " liberals, and uplifters, who he felt failed to understand the deep nonrational sentiments that are an essential foundation for a satisfactory and stable society; on occasion he could infuriate some of his hearers, who thought him cynical, or pedantic, or both. Yet he was also full of kindness and helpfulness, especially to the young; he recognized and encouraged talent in young men of the most diverse sorts who came to the Society of Fellows. He respected good workmanship, whether in a carpenter or a mathematical physicist.
Connections
On June 1, 1910, Henderson married Edith Lawrence Thayer, a sister-in-law of his former professor, T. W. Richards. They had one son, Lawrence Joseph.
