16 



inorganic. Similarly, in 1845 Kolbe by a series of stepwise reactions 

 produced the familiar acetic acid, surely a "genuine" organic com- 

 pound, from carbon disulfide, which in turn had been prepared by 

 reacting carbon with sulfur. The Chemical Abstracts today lists over 

 5 million organic compounds, elequent testimony to our unified 

 understanding of organic chemistry, one single chemistry of carbon 

 compounds. 



THE EVOLUTIONARY SYNTHESIS 



It appears that it was Charles Darwin who first formulated the 

 modern approach to the origins of life, with a view of the circum- 

 stances, not of today, but of the distant past when the first life was 

 somehow formed. He wrote in a private letter in 1871: "If we could 

 conceive in some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and 

 phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, etc., present, that a protein 

 compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more com- 

 plex changes, at the present day such matter would be instantly 

 devoured or absorbed which would not have been the case before 

 living creatures were formed." In short, the logical needs for the 

 origin of life include the absence of !ife: a sterile environment was 

 exactly what was present then and what is utterly unknown in the 

 biosphere today. But for 50 years such large ideas lay dormant. They 

 were ahead of the state of biology and geology. The question was too 

 grand. Pasteur's wonderful declaration is true for our geological 

 epoch; the ancient epoch when life originated, which is not at all the 

 present natural life-filled environment, was not brought under study. 



In 1924, a young Russian biochemist published a preliminary 

 account of his ideas on the chemical origins of life. In a booklet 

 entitled Proiskhozhdenie Zhizny, he pointed out that the complex 

 combination of manifestations and properties so characteristic of 

 life must have arisen in the process of the evolution of matter. 

 A. Oparin had learned Mendeleev's ideas on the possible origin of 

 hydrocarbons from the carbides in the crust of the Earth, and 

 injected into his own thinking a new notion concerning the reducing 

 nature of the early atmosphere. To Oparin's great credit, this obser- 

 vation was made before the astrophysicists had realized that the stars 

 were 90% hydrogen. 



