Bioplastic

Near-synonym: bioplasmic

The smooth or organic involuntary muscular fibres are single bioplastic elements, long so-called cells, each with a nucleus situated about the middle. They contain microsomata, and in disease deposits of degeneration resembling those of the striated muscle […] The smooth muscular fibres require yet to be studied more closely, which is a matter of some difficulty, as they cannot easily be isolated. ¶ CHEMICAL CONSTITUTION OF THE BLOOD (HEMOPLASM). The blood, like the brain and muscles, must be considered as a great aggregate of bioplastic centres, the corpuscles, and of bioplastic matter, the living serum; as such it is an organ, but unlike other organs, which are fixed, it is in a state of constant movement. Morphologically the walls of the blood-vessels are the limiting membrane of this aggregate hemoplasm, though when fully developed for their ubiquitous function they do not any longer stand in any chemical or histological relation to their contents. The living serum may therefore be considered only in a morphological sense as the enchylema of the blood-vessels considered as stroma. But the corpuscles fully preserve their bioplastic structure, such as we have defined it in the first chapter.

Profounder yet is the characteristic of personality that is attributed to spiritualistic life. However defined the word, whether it is regarded as the sum of moral powers, or the equipment of conscious being, one thing is certain, it belongs not to bioplasm. The palm tree is not a person; the lizard wears not the sign of personality; the whale is not a person; the kangaroo claims not the lineage of a person. Personality marks the man; it makes man what he is. By this is he separated from the bioplastic realm and enters the divine. This is not fiction, or a term of flattery, or the exclamation of self-praise. Personality is man's inheritance from God, and he has the right to shout over it. A complete philosophy will not fail to attempt to account for soul-life as it has attempted to account for the non-living and the living worlds about us. Evidently the soul is not the product of an evolutionary force. As the living does not emerge from the non-living, so the spiritual does not issue from the bioplastic. Higher forms of life were never produced by lower, although chronologically the relation between them may be that of antecedent and consequent. The abyss between different kinds of life is not crossed by an evolutionary bridge. The chain of life does not extend from bioplasm to soul.

But we make the distinction between what may be called direct assaults from outside, and the action of agents received into the bioplastic substance by its own ingesting action. ¶ Mechanical Injury.—By this is meant such an injury as a blow or a wound, which causes solution of continuity. In the case of an ordinary blow received on a muscular mass, the subsequent pain experienced on use is a true myalgia. It has caused loss of tonus in the bioplastic units which make up the muscle, and consequent painful or impaired contraction. ¶ Loss of Temperature.—Frost or any agency which reduces the bioplasm below the temperature required for its vitality, in the same way impairs the contractility by altering the tonus of the bioplastic units. The same remark applies, of course, to the application or incidence of too high a temperature. ¶ Microbic Parasitism.—The bioplastic units, corpuscles, or cells, are in perpetual danger from the assaults of these microbic foes. So long as the tonus of the bioplasm is good, that is, is well maintained, so long will it resist their entry or connection in the relation of host and parasite. But when from any cause the bioplasm suffers loss of vitality, or as we say impairment and diminution of tonus, its condition is such as to allow the establishment of this connection.

A bioplastic can be defined as a polymer that is manufactured into a commercial product from a natural source or renewable resource. A bioplastic can be biodegradable, but a biodegradable plastic does not mean the material was derived fully or in part from a biological source.