Aleksandr Oparin
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Aleksandr Ivanovich Oparin (Алекса́ндр Ива́нович Опарин, March 2 (February 18 Julian) 1894 – April 21, 1980) was a Soviet biologist and biochemist, who has been acclaimed as one of the greatest authorities on the origin of life.
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[edit] Life
Oparin was born in Uglich. He graduated from the Moscow State University in 1917. In 1924 he put forward a theory of life on Earth developing through gradual chemical evolution of carbon-based molecules in primeval soup. In 1935, he founded the RAS Biochemistry Institute. In 1946, he was admitted to the Soviet Academy of Sciences. In 1970, he was elected President of the International Society for the Study of the Origins of Life. On his passing on April 21, 1980, he was interred in Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow.
[edit] Theory
Oparin sometimes was called "Darwin of the 20th century", and this is no exaggeration. Although he began by reviewing the various panspermia theories, he was primarily interested in how life initially began. As early as 1922, he asserted the following tenets:
1. There is no fundamental difference between a living organism and lifeless matter. The complex combination of manifestations and properties so characteristic of life must have arisen in the process of the evolution of matter.
2. Taking into account the recent discovery of methane in the atmospheres of Jupiter and the other giant planets, Oparin postulated that the infant Earth had possessed a strongly reducing atmosphere, containing methane, ammonia, hydrogen, and water vapor. In his opinion, these were the raw materials for the evolution of life.
3. At first there were the simple solutions of organic substances, the behavior of which was governed by the properties of their component atoms and the arrangement of those atoms in the molecular structure. But gradually, as the result of growth and increased complexity of the molecules, new properties have come into being and a new colloidal-chemical order was imposed on the more simple organic chemical relations. These newer properties were determined by the spatial arrangement and mutual relationship of the molecules.
4. In this process biological orderliness already comes into prominence. Competition, speed of growth, struggle for existence and, finally, natural selection determined such a form of material organization which is characteristic of living things of the present time.
Oparin outlined a way in which basic organic chemicals might form into microscopic localized systems - possible precursors of cells - from which primitive living things could develop. He cited the work done by de Jong on coacervates and other experimental studies, including his own, into organic chemicals which, in solution, may spontaneously form droplets and layers. Oparin suggested that different types of coacervates might have formed in the Earth's primordial ocean and, subsequently, been subject to a selection process leading eventually to life.
He could not demonstrate his theory then, but that work was finished by Miller in 1953, demonstrating that before life there was pre-life. His experiment demonstrated that Oparin's theory about organisms that created the molecule and then the cell was right.
[edit] References
- Oparin, A. I. The Origin of Life. New York: Dover (1952) (first published in 1938).
- Oparin, A., and V. Fesenkov. Life in the Universe. New York: Twayne Publishers (1961).
[edit] Major works
- "The External Factors in Enzyme Interactions Within a Plant Cell"
- "The Origin of Life on Earth"
- "Life, Its Nature, Origin and Evolution"
- "The History of the Theory of Genesis and Evolution of Life"
