17 



In 1928, J. B. S. Haldane, the British biologist, independently 

 of Oparin, wrote a classic paper, "The Origin of Life." Haldane 

 speculated on the early conditions suitable for the emergence of life. 

 According to him, when UV light acted upon a mixture of water, 

 carbon dioxide, and ammonia, a variety of organic substances were 

 made, including sugars and apparently some of the materials from 

 which proteins are built up. Before the origin of life they must have 

 accumulated until the primitive oceans reached the constituency of a 

 hot, dilute soup. Haldane gave us the concept of the "primordial 

 soup." 



Almost 20 years after Haldane's publication, J. D. Bernal of the 

 University of London conjectured before the British Physical Society 

 in a famous lecture entitled The Physical Basis of Life that clay sur- 

 faces were involved in the origin of life. He was looking for ways and 

 means by which the primordial molecules in the hot, dilute soup 

 could be brought together to give rise to polymers capable of replica- 

 tion. A physicist and crystallographer by training, Bernal was particu- 

 larly attracted to the role of surface phenomena in the origin of life. 

 He argued that favorable conditions for concentration, which may 

 have taken place on a very large scale, were provided by the adsorp- 

 tion of organic molecules on the fine clay deposits. The role of clay 

 in primordial organic synthesis is today a lively area of investigation. 



THE EXPERIMENTAL ERA: ORIGINS ENTER THE 



LABORATORY 



In the early fifties, the Oparin-Haldane hypothesis, enriched by 

 Bernal's ideas, was being widely discussed. Many experimenters were 

 interested in putting it to the test. We must, however, recognize that 

 over a long period of time innumerable experiments had been per- 

 formed to generate organic molecules of biological interest. For 

 example, Haber, in 1917, exposed a mixture of gases to electric dis- 

 charges and postulated that any compound which could plausibly be 

 synthesized would come out of such a system. (Rabinowitz, 1945, 

 narrates many other examples, although they were not undertaken 

 with the set purpose of studying the origin of life.) 



The first reported experiment in the series of investigations to 

 test the hypothesis of chemical evolution was done at Berkeley in 



