Chemistry's Miraculous Colloids
|
Reader's Digest
March 1936
by Kenneth Andrews
A group of executives sat tense and silent in an office in the RCA Building in New York City.
They stared with incredulous eyes at a purple orchid. A short time before it had been rescued
from a pile of debris, a withered, yellowed thing, dead. Now the petals were fresh and crisp, its
colors vivid. It was blooming with new life, and would continue to do so for 16 or 17 days!
Dr. Frederick S. Macy, one of the country outstanding bacteriologists, had added a teaspoonful
of an amber tinted liquid to the quart of water in the bottle which held the flower. Here was
striking indication of the mysteries that lie ahead in that comparatively unexplored realm of
science known as colloidal chemistry. It was one of innumerable experiments these gentlemen
had been witnessing for a year or more, on behalf of their internationally known pharmaceutical
company.
A few days later they signed an 8-year contract for the rights to a solution similar to the one in Dr.
Macy's bottle. They will invest more than $12,000,000 a year in it, from now on.
To gain a working conception of what colloidal chemistry is, consider that living tissues and
organs are simply great masses of cells-billions of them. The energy, the very life force of these
cells, is obtained from certain minerals and metal, among them iron, iodine, manganese, copper.
There are some 32, with traces of as many others, in the human body. Colloidal chemistry is the
science which converts those elements into particles so minute that they can be utilized by
living cells.
Normally, nature supplies the cells with these elements in their colloidal form. Science has now
learned to produce these colloids in the laboratory. "Lately, life has been prolonged by colloid
action," says Dr. Macy, "and better knowledge of the subject will certainly result in prolonging
the normal term of existence.!"
In the case of the apparently dead orchid, copper in colloidal form was needed to restore the
proper balance of the mineral and metals that comprised the life cells of the flower. Once that
balance was restored, the cells began to function and the orchid lived again.
In the Colloidal Laboratories of America they have a motion picture which is as weird as
anything ever shown on a screen- a movie of a headache. The actors are the nerves in a human
head, magnified millions of times. You see the headache. Those nerve endings are tangled,
twisting, writhing. Then you see the colloids enter. These rescuers, smaller than the blood
corpuscles themselves, march straight to the spot where there is an unbalance of the vital
metals.
You see those laboratory-prepared colloids restore normalcy there at the seat of the trouble.
Then you see the nerves cease their twisting, relax, and assume their proper position. Dr.
Steinmetz, the wizard of electricity, devised a method of utilizing colloids in the treatment of
sinus trouble.
Such treatment consists of the introduction of metals - gold and iodine, in the case of alcoholism
- which correct the unbalance caused by alcoholic poisons.
The effect of colloids is explainable in part by electric action. Sick and dead and broken-down
cells are attracted to the colloids by electromagnetic force, as iron filings are attracted to a
magnet. The colloids carry those decayed or poisonous substances into the blood stream, and
they are eliminated, the system meanwhile adapting what it needs of the colloids. A simple
illustration will suggest the immense powers that are being unsealed.
Suppose we have a cube of iron measuring one inch sq. The total surface would be six square
inches. The electrical charge is on the surface would be limited to that of 6 sq. in.; the greater the
surface area, the greater the charge; and if we divide the cube of iron into smaller pieces we
increase the surface areas.
By colloidal chemistry, that iron cube can be divided into particles so minute that they are
invisible, hence instead of six square inches of surface emanating electric energy, we have
something like 127 acres.
In colloidal form iodine, for example, is one of the elements essential to the well-being of human
cells. Yet if you should drink as much as two or three grains of free iodine, it would kill you. Dr.
Macy, when explaining this, held up an eight-ounce cup full of colloidal iodine. "There," he said,
"is the equivalent of 740 grains of free iodine - enough to kill 300 people" and he drank it.
In that form iodine is not only harmless but beneficial. The same is true of arsenic and other
deadly poisons.
Colloidal chemistry was evolved by David Graham, a British chemist, 50 years ago, but only
recently has it been realized even by scientists, what enormous influence it is destined to have
in medicine, agriculture and industry.
"We have television now," one of the world's greatest scholars said recently. "There is, as I see
it, just one great development left for our time. That is in the understanding of colloidal metals. It
is the 'Fourth Estate of Matter,' the other three being land, water, and air."
Says Dr. Macy:
"The study of these phenomena constitutes the road to the ultimate in human knowledge."