Scientific biography: REFLECTIONS ON HIS WORK
SOME REFLECTIONS ON HIS WORK
Compared with the trend of specialisation that marked science in the 20th century, in the line of the great classical scientists Faustino Cordón elaborated a theory capable of integrating the data that experimental science had accumulated over the previous two hundred years in order to explain them more coherently. He can be said to have been a biologist who was truly faithful to Darwin, capable of further developing the theory of evolution in order to induce a method that allowed him to explore the interpretation of the evolution of living beings and led him to face a new order of biological problems, among which three stand out: how do living beings emerge, what is their nature, and what is their evolutive sequence?
“At this stage of my life I have the impression that, remaining faithful to the previous evolutionist trend personified by Darwin, our forty-year effort is contributing to the inflection in biology towards evolutionism that is now called for: a new focus on defining the main types of living being through their process of phylogenic and ontogenic origin".
Faustino Cordón achieved the aim imposed on him by his work as a biologist: that of offering a specific model of the living being explained through the evolutive process of reality. However, his death interrupted his treatise at what he considered to be the second stage of cellular evolution, that of the autotrophic cell. He attributed to this cell the achievement of changing from feeding on residues of dissolved polypeptides (when the associations of proteins were exhausted) to feeding on dissolved carbon dioxide, ammonia and hydrogen sulphide, an achievement that was possible due to the metabolic conquests of photosynthesis and protein synthesis. His work must therefore be continued with the research and writing of Part Two of the Treatise, on the origin, nature and evolution of cells, and Part Three, on the origin, nature and evolution of the animal (including man).
At the Foundation for Research on Evolutionist Biology (FIBE), Madrid, 1980,
His books Cocinar hizo al hombre.(Spanish) and La naturaleza del hombre a la luz de su origen biológico(spanish) are drafts of what would have been the last chapter of his treatise dedicated to man.
The National Library of Spain is the depositary of an enormous amount of unpublished notes referring particularly to the protein, the cell and the animal, which the author accumulated over the years but did not have time to put into final form.
As is shown by his conferences, courses and seminars, though he carried out his work far from the academic world, Cordón enjoyed great prestige in life and played an important role as a lecturer and trainer of young researchers. Of special interest for its educational nature is his book History of biochemistry.
His commitment to the society of his time led him to reflect on many aspects of science and culture, as is shown in some of hisinformative articles, and books such as La actividad científica y su ambiente social(Spanish), Pensamiento general y pensamiento científico (Spanish) and La función de la ciencia en la sociedad.(Spanish).
As with any new theory, scientific rigour requires Cordon's model of the living being to have a greater capacity to interpret what is known and predict what is unknown than the current models. Until now the explanatory capacity of his model of the living being has met this requirement by accounting coherently for the set of biochemical data on the protein and the cell with the metabolism common to all cells. However, the model of the living being that he induced must show the same explanatory capacity for the types of living beings whose interpretation we lack: the later types of cells and associations of cells, and the origin, nature and evolution of the animal (including man). If this proves to be the case, the model of the living being proposed by Cordón will allow biologists not only to give greater coherency to the great amount of experimental data that have been accumulated, but also to solve problems that current biology has not yet considered: what is the nature of any living being understood as a psyche that emerges from its soma and is in permanent interaction with its environment, which it transforms constantly.
