Science: Whence Life?

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Give a biologist a pinch of slime mold—primitive but living protoplasm—and he will have no difficulty predicating an evolutionary ascent, from that bit of animate substance, which leads to large, complex and reasoning beings like himself. Yet the prime question remains: How did the first bit of life appear on earth?

To that question there are three possible answers: 1) life was planted on earth by divine power; 2) life emerged from nonliving matter by some pregnant combination of chemical circumstances; 3) life was transported to earth in meteorites or some other carrier, from somewhere else in the universe. Quite satisfactory to many people is the first answer, which renders further inquiry into the problem superfluous. Most biologists, however, prefer to make a choice between the second and the third.

One of those who prefer the second answer is Associate Director A. I. Oparin of the Biochemical Institute of the Soviet Academy of Science. For more than 15 years Dr. Oparin has studied the question in the light of present-day chemical knowledge. Between life and nonlife, in his opinion, there is no sharp boundary. He does not believe that life emerged suddenly and spontaneously from dead matter, but that it developed very gradually after a long preliminary evolution of organic but nonliving substances. In this slow unfolding an observer would have been unable to say just where life began, unless he had concocted an arbitrary and superficial definition. Dr. Oparin has constructed a fairly complete picture of how it all happened, which he published two years ago in Russian. Published last week in the U. S. was The Origin of Life* a translation of Oparin's book made by Dr. Sergius Morgulis, professor of biochemistry at the University of Nebraska.

With the amused impatience of a godless materialist. Soviet Scientist Oparin waves away the various vitalistic theories which hold that life appeared because of some transcendent animating principle which pervades the universe—or that life has always existed. He also refuses to believe that life was carried to earth in meteorites, since existing meteorites show no sign of containing viable organisms. Dr. Oparin also rejects the theory of free spores or other life-bearing particles driven to earth through interstellar space by impacts from radiation. He holds that ultraviolet or cosmic radiation would kill any such life particles beyond the sheltering blanket of the earth's atmosphere.