Origins of Ooze-Part Two

The scientist in "Ooze," named John Corliss Cranmer, was drawn to the swamplands of southern Alabama because of the protozoa that live there. These were the subjects of his scientific research, the result being his unwitting development of a giant and ravenous amoeba, one that ultimately devoured him and his household. (1, 2) Anthony Rud's narrator has his opinion of the place that drew Cranmer. He refers to "the stinking depths of that sinister swamp."

There are lots of oozy and gluey words in "Ooze": viscid, gluey mire, mud, effluvium, scum, slimy, sticky, and of course ooze. There are other words, too, words related to or that might be used to describe colloids: agar, amorphous, rubbery, translucent, glistening, protoplasm. The word colloid dates from the 1850s. It refers to substances that are gelatinous or sticky and glue-like. The study of colloids dates from around the same time, the 1840s to the 1860s. On a related matter, synthetic rubber and plastics are polymers. The study and development of these synthetic polymers dates from the 1800s as well. The discovery of DNA came later, but DNA is also a polymer. It's the true staff of life, twisted around itself like tentacles or a pair of snakes, and it's what Cranmer would have had to manipulate, I think, in order to make his amoeba grow. Maybe we should consider Cranmer's amoeba a genetically modified organism or GMO. Those can be bad for your health, especially when they have great, engulfing pseudopodia.

Protoplasm is colloidal. Wikipedia, that font of all knowledge, describes the stuff: "Protoplasm is physically translucent, granular[,] slimy, semifluid or viscous." Living things, then, are related to slime, or, in Rud's story, ooze. If you're a scientist, a biologist like John Corliss Cranmer, you're drawn to slime and ooze as sources of life and as the substance of life. One can become the other. One is the other. Or so some have thought.

In 1922, Alexander Oparin (1894-1980), a Soviet biochemist, began speculating on the origins of life. (3) In 1924, he proposed the prior existence of what people still call "the primordial soup," the place or conditions in which life on earth is supposed to have begun. For some reason, this idea still has credence, even though it relies essentially on a prescientific idea debunked by science, namely spontaneous generation. It's also not scientific in that it has not been and cannot be observed in nature nor replicated in the laboratory. And yet we're supposed to accept it as fact, the alternative of course being an intolerable affront to our beliefs in our own greatness and the smallness of all other things. We should remember in all of this that Oparin was a follower of Marxism, which is, among other things, a pseudoscience, as well as a supporter or associate of Trofim Lysenko (1898-1976), who peddled his own brand of pseudoscience, which had (little) to do with heredity and genetics.

Anyway, if you're looking for slime and ooze and to play games with life, swamps and bogs are places for you. You might also like Charles Darwin's "warm little pond," an expression that comes from a letter he wrote in 1871. (Lee Cranmer keeps his "pet" in a warm little pond next to his father's lodge.) Or, if you're like a nineteenth-century scientist or novelist looking for cephalopods as your subject matter, you might go to the ocean in search of ooze. But if you're a pulp-fiction writer from the 1920s, especially one who admires a certain British author of science fiction stories, how exactly might you get there? You might start by reading H.G. Wells' tome The Outline of History, published in 1920.

In Wells' vast survey, history begins with primordial ooze, with "the soft jellies and simple beginnings that flowed and crawled for hundreds of millions of years between the tidal levels and in the shallow, warm waters of the Proterozoic seas." After a while, Wells reduced these creatures to shorthand as "[t]he first jelly-like beginnings of life." I think the implication here is not jellyfish-like, but colloidal. And I think the suggestion is just what Darwin had suggested decades before and what Oparin proposed a few years later: that life arose spontaneously from non-life in the warm, shallow waters of a primordial earth, essentially acting as first cause and creating itself. Again, we should remember that Oparin was a Marxist, thus a materialist and officially an atheist; Wells was a socialist, thus also a materialist, possibly an outright atheist; and Darwin was, well, a Darwinist.

Jellies are colloids, as are Oparin's coacervates. The so-called primordial soup, the thing that both gave rise to and became life, might also be called primordial ooze, as I've done here, or primordial slime. In his Outline, Wells mentioned "that microscopic blob of living matter the Amœba." And so we have a category: slime, blobs, jellies, and ooze. (4) Oparin didn't originate the idea of the primordial ooze, however, nor did Wells or even Darwin. If you want the ur-source of slime, you have to go back, I think, to a German-Romantic philosopher of the nineteenth century.

To be continued . . .

Notes
(1) There's something missing in Rud's description of Cranmer's methods, but that's because there was something missing in our scientific knowledge at the time, namely our knowledge and understanding of DNA.
(2) You could say that Cranmer was involved in gain-of-function research and that the deaths at his lodge were the results of a lab leak, but that would make you a conspiracy theorist, a racist xenophobe, a science denier, a domestic terrorist, and possibly an insurrectionist, so don't do it.
(3) He had the perfect name for a biochemist: it sounds like the name of a protein, or a drug you see on TV: "Ask your doctor about Oparin."
(4) On the website Dark Worlds Quarterly, author G.W. Thomas has assembled a dozen comic book stories from 1940 to 1956, all involving jellies, slime, and ooze. One of these is "The Swamp Horror," from Beware #15 (May 1953). As Mr. Thomas notes, "The Swamp Horror" is very similar to "Ooze." I have seen only what he has posted, but what he has posted shows enough. It looks very much as though the story, written by Richard Kahn and drawn by Harry Harrison (later of science fiction fame), is a conscious adaptation of "Ooze."

"The Swamp Horror" was published in May 1953, just two short months after "Slime" by Joseph Payne Brennan had appeared in Weird Tales. If we back up a little to give the author time to write his script and the artist time to draw his story, also for the printer to print the book and the publisher to issue it, we might as well call the two stories contemporaneous with each other. Brennan and the Kahn/Harrison team seem to have arrived at the same idea at the same time. But were they from the same source? Did Brennan read or know of "Ooze"? Whatever the case may be, you can see what G.W. Thomas has written and the images he has assembled in his excellent article "Plant Monsters of the Golden Age: Slime Monsters!" from December 23, 2021, by clicking here.

Before "The Swamp Horror" in Beware #15 (May 1953), there was this cover of Beware #13, from January 1953. At first I thought we had our stories and issues mixed up: this looks like it could be an illustration of "The Swamp Horror" from two months later. Instead it illustrates a story called "Rebirth." More to the point, it looks like it could illustrate "Ooze," from Weird Tales, March 1923. The theme is the same and the cover, by Harry Harrison, has all of the elements of Richard R. Epperly's cover from thirty years before, although they are rearranged, like the chromosomes of a giant amoeba. (Harrison did the interior art for "Rebirth" as well.) So maybe "Ooze" was on the minds of the men who created Beware comic books. By the way, Vincent Napoli also had a story in this issue of Beware. He was also an illustrator for Weird Tales, including for the reprinting of "Ooze" in the issue of January 1952.

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley