The Origin of Life

Alexander Oparin's ORIGIN OF LIFE came out in Russian in 1936, translated and published in English by Macmillan in 1938. The Dover text, which I ordered, came out in 1958 and is a complete reproduction of the Macmillan 1938 edition. The questions Oparin raised way back when are debated in the pages of NATURE today. The most basic question: did life on earth originate from meteorites impacting on earth or was there sufficient chemical interaction on earth to create life? The 1953 Miller-Urey experiment, despite its defects, suggested that chemical interaction on planet earth was sufficient to create life; discoveries of thermophiles thriving in deep sea fumaroles, as recent as the year 2000, has confirmed Oparin's hypothesis. And the student hates to believe that Miller-Urey did not read Oparin's Chapter V: "Origin of Organic Substances Primary Proteins." In this chapter Oparin details experiments which dated from 1904 similar to the 1953 Miller-Urey experiment. While Oparin might appear dated, he made an important intellectual step in early earth environment providing questions and suggestions for subsequent research to follow. (And after all, only in recent years has it been decided that the Hadean Eon had an ocean and magnetosphere and atmosphere.) The Dover text is in excellent condition despite being some 60 years old and certainly well priced. Oparin is a good read.

Alexander Ivanovich Oparin (1894-1980) was a Soviet biochemist who was famous for his studies of the origin of life. In this influential work, he asserts that "biogenesis seems to be a reasonably consistent biological necessity," adding that "Life has neither arisen spontaneously nor has it existed eternally. It must have, therefore, resulted from a long evolution of matter, its origin being merely one step in the course of its historical development." He rejects the notion of panspermia (i.e., that life on Earth may have originated from `seeds' from other planets, as proposed by persons such as Svante Arrhenius in his book Worlds In The Making - The Evolution Of The Universe) stating that "We must, instead, search for the sources of life within the boundaries of our own planet." He develops his concept for the conditions under which life might have arisen by natural processes. "However strange this may seem at first sight, a sterile, life-less period in the existence of our planet was a necessary condition for the primary origin of life. This condition prevailed only in the remote past but does not exist now, since the surface of the Earth is already thickly populated by innumerable highly organized living beings." He asserts that modern experiments are relevant to such a "historical" inquiry because "From the time when the primary ocean came into being, the environment in which organic substances existed resembled our own so closely that we may safely draw conclusions about the progress of chemical transformations on the basis of our knowledge of what is happening today." He qualifies his statements by saying, "The tremendously long intervals of time separating the single steps in this process make it impossible to reproduce the process as it occurred in nature under available laboratory conditions." He admits, however, that "for the solution of our problem it is not necessary to reproduce the process in all its details." "We shall concern ourselves simply with the question whether protein substances ... could have arisen in the primitive hydrosphere together with other complex organic substances." As an orthodox Marxist, Oparin notes that "In this sense ... we should interpret Engels' formula: `Life is a form of the existence of protein bodies.'" His ultimate conclusion is that "With the appearance of primary organisms the question of the origin of life on Earth is, properly speaking, closed." Whether one agrees with Oparin or not, this very influential work is a keystone of modern evolutionary theory.