Life from Ooze?
For many years, scientists assumed that life started in what Darwin called "a warm little pond." It wasn't until they really started to think about what Earth's environment must have been like billions of years ago that the "warm little pond" idea was scrapped.
Most scientists now think that the early Earth was a distinctly unpleasant brew of poisonous gases and immense volcanic flows. About ten years ago, patent attorney Günter Wächtershäuser (What's with these attorneys? Einstein was a patent attorney, too!) proposed that the ingredients of life may have first assembled on the surface of minerals (iron and nickle sulfide) that may have collected near underwater volcanic gas vents. Wächtershäuser's idea of the perfect "nursery" for life was a superhot ooze of sulfur and magma similar to today's volcanic and deep-sea vents-- conditions that were quite probable on early Earth.
In 1997, Wächtershäuser and chemist Claudia Huber mixed carbon monoxide, hydrogen sulfide, nickel sulfide, and iron sulfide particles at 100°C and demonstrated that amino acids could form in their "nursery." The following year, using the same nasty broth, the two scientists succeeded in linking amino acids into the short, protein-like chains known as peptides.
Because this was the first time that scientists made peptides just from materials that would have been available on early Earth, evolutionary biologist Norman Pace (U of C at Berkeley) considered the achievement "very exciting." Stanley Miller, however, urges caution and points out that forming peptides is still a long way from forming a living cell.
For more information, visit these Web sites"Life's First Scalding Steps" – Science News Online article, January 9, 1999
http://www.sciencemag.orgThe Origins and Early Evolution of Life Web site
http://www.chemistry.ucsc.edu/Projects/origin/home.html
In the News
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