Origenes De La Vida

Review

Endeavour

Vol.30 No.1 March 2006

The origins of research into
the origins of life
Iris Fry
The Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel

Most scientists at the end of the 19th and the beginning
of the 20th century chose to ignore the question of the
origin of life on Earth, regarding it as too mysteriousand
complex to handle. Yet, in the early 1950s an experimental field devoted to the study of the problem made
its first steps. The pioneering theories of several
scientists in the first decades of the 20th century played
a major role in this transformation, notably those of the
Russian biochemist Alexander I. Oparin and the British
geneticist and biochemist J.B.S. Haldane. The ideas of
thelesser-known American psycho-physiologist Leonard Troland also made a significant contribution to
subsequent developments in origin-of-life research.
Therefore, it is well worth taking a look at the
professional, philosophical and ideological commitments that shaped the approaches of the three scientists
to origin-of-life research.
Introduction
In the fall of 1951, Stanley Miller, a youngdoctoral
student at the University of Chicago, was fascinated and
inspired by a lecture delivered by the Nobel Laureate
physicist and chemist, Harold Urey. In his lecture, Urey
discussed physical and chemical conditions that might
have existed on the primordial Earth, and their potential
relevance to the emergence of life. Miller convinced Urey
to let him try his hand at experimentallysimulating these
conditions. In Miller’s simulated primordial atmosphere
and ocean, contained in a glass apparatus that he
designed with Urey, the synthesis of organic molecules,
mainly amino acids – the building blocks of proteins, was
experimentally demonstrated for the first time in the
spring of 1953. The Miller–Urey experiment and many
others that followed in the 1950s and 1960s led to thecreation of an experimental scientific field devoted to the
elucidation of the origin of life on Earth.
Both the empirical setup of these experiments and the
philosophical assumptions underlying them can be traced
back to several theoretical developments in the early 20th
century. In the 1920s and the 1930s, the Russian
biochemist Alexander I. Oparin and the British biochemist and geneticistJ.B.S. Haldane described possible
scenarios for the emergence of life on Earth, the common
elements of which came later to be known as the Oparin–
Haldane hypothesis [1]. However, this hypothesis and the
theory formulated by the American psycho-physiologist
Corresponding author: Fry, I. (iris.fry@gmail.com).

Leonard Troland in the 1910s had to overcome an impasse
in scientific attitudes to theorigin of life before they could
be accepted by the scientific community (Figure 1).
Two key developments in the late 19th century played a
major part in creating this impasse [2]. Experiments
performed in the 1860s by the French chemist Louis
Pasteur convinced most scientists that organisms, including microorganisms, originated only from their parents
and were not, as believed for ages,repeatedly and
spontaneously generated from inanimate matter. Simultaneously, Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, published
in 1859, focused attention on the primordial earth.
Although it did not explicitly discuss the emergence of
life, the concept of Darwinian evolution led to the question
that challenged Pastuer’s logic: how did primitive life
forms originate in the first place?
By thebeginning of the 20th century several other
factors had exacerbated this intellectual quandary. New
cytological studies revealed the crucial function of the
nucleus, which contrasted sharply with established views
about the homogeneity of the protoplasm and following
the rise of biochemistry, enzymes were being discovered
and isolated. The realization that even the simplest of cells
was...