Alexander Oparin

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100 birth anniversary of A.I. Oparin. Special cancellation 02/03/1994 Moscow, Central Post Office

(Опарин, Александр Иванович Uglich, Yaroslavl Province, Russian Empire - April 21, 1980, Moscow, USSR) - Soviet biologist and biochemist who created the theory of the origin of life on Earth from abiotic components; Academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences (1946; corresponding member since 1939), Hero of Socialist Labor (1969). Winner of the Lenin Prize.

Theory of the origin of life

Although Oparin's started out reviewing various panspermia theories, including those of Hermann von Helmholtz and William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), he was primarily interested in how life began. As early as 1922, he asserted that:

1. There is no fundamental difference between a living organism and lifeless matter. The complex combination of manifestations and properties characteristic of life must have arisen as a part of 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 suggested that the infant Earth had possessed a strongly reducing atmosphere, contain this version Rssian WP]ing methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water vapor. In his opinion, these were the raw materials for the evolution of life.
3. In Oparin's formulation, there were first only simple solutions of organic matter, the behavior of which was governed by the properties of their component atoms and the arrangement of these atoms into a molecular structure. Gradually though, he said, the resulting growth and increased complexity of molecules brought new properties into being and a new colloidal-chemical order developed as a successor to more simple relationships between and among organic chemicals. These newer properties were determined by the interactions of these more complex molecules.
4. Oparin posited that this process brought biological orderliness into prominence. According to Oparin, competition, speed of cell growth, survival of the fittest, struggle for existence and, finally, natural selection determined the form of material organization characteristic of modern-day living things.

Oparin outlined a way he thought that basic organic chemicals might have formed into microscopic localized systems, from which primitive living things could have developed. He cited work done by de Jong and Sidney W. Fox on coacervates and research by others, including himself, into organic chemicals which, in solution, might spontaneously form droplets and layers. Oparin suggested that different types of coacervates could have formed in the Earth's primordial ocean and been subject to a selection process that led, eventually, to life.

While Oparin himself was unable to conduct experiments to test any of these ideas, later researchers tried. In 1953, Stanley Miller attempted an experiment to investigate whether chemical self-organization could have been possible on pre-historic Earth. The Miller–Urey experiment introduced heat (to provide reflux) and electrical energy (sparks, to simulate lightning) into a mixture of several simple components that would be present in a reducing atmosphere. Within a fairly short period of time a variety of familiar organic compounds, such as amino acids, were synthesised. The compounds that formed were somewhat more complex than the molecules present at the beginning of the experiment.