Oct 11 1977
From The Space Library
ARC announced that a team of its scientists had made a "major breakthrough" in explaining the origin of life. ARC's Dr. James Lawless, team leader, presented a report on the work to the Pacific Conference on Chemistry meeting in Anaheim, Calif. Chemical evolution experiments in the past several yrs had applied electrical discharges to ammonia, methane, and water to produce basic life molecules, including amino acids and nucleotides, but with no indication how the molecules formed organic building blocks in ever more complex groups until a group appeared that could replicate itself.
The new experiments had used metal clays normally present on primordial earth and ocean shores. Mixing amino acid solutions with everyday metal clays showed that the clays attracted the thousand varying aminos out of solution. One nickel-containing clay preferentially attracted the 20 amino acids making up protein, main ingredient of living cells; of 8 clays tried, only the nickel clay did this. The other metal clays destroyed nonprotein-forming amino acids faster than protein acids, indicating how the life-forming acids were selected and concentrated. Experiments simulating tidal action on the clays produced chains of amino acids, as many as 8 so far; time would eventually produce the far longer chains found in life. A zinc clay, only one of 9 metal clays tried, had a similar effect on DNA building blocks; the presence of metals in life systems today had resulted from prebiological chemistry, Dr. Lawless said. (ARC Release 77-43; NASA Release 77-220)
JPL announced appointment of Dr. Rochus E. Vogt, professor of physics at CalTech and principal investigator for the cosmic ray experiments on Voyagers l and 2, as chief scientist. (JPL anno Oct 11/77)
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