48 ETERNITY OF LIFE 



The well-known Russian geochemist V. Vernadskii (1863- 

 1945) presents the clearest example of this tendency. In his 

 works written in the twenties and thirties of this century 

 he puts forward the view that the idea " that logic demands 

 that there should be a beginning of life came into science as 

 a problem of religion and philosophy " and that it is " foreign 

 to the empirical foundations of science". He wrote: 



None of the exact relationships between facts which we know 

 will be changed if this problem has a negative solution, that is, 

 if we admit that life always existed and had no beginning, that 

 living organisms never arose at any time or place from inert 

 material, that in the history of the earth there were no geological 

 periods in which life did not exist.^ 



Vernadskii held that the essential feature of the material 

 and energetic characteristics of living bodies which distin- 

 guishes them from inert matter is that a special orientation 

 is inherent in the former.^ He pointed out that even Pasteur 

 recognised the possibility of different states of cosmic exten- 

 sion and that he used this concept to explain the phenomenon 

 of asymmetry in living things, or, to use the terminology of 

 Vernadskii, * rightness and leftness '. This orientation which 

 is associated with individual organisms is described by Ver- 

 nadskii as follows : The mirror-image forms of each chemical 

 compound are acknowledged to be chemically identical in 

 inert matter and different in living organisms. 



The chemical dissimilarity is thus conspicuous in the 

 products of biochemical processes, in which either the dextro 

 or laevo isomer predominates. Vernadskii further puts for- 

 ward the idea that this orientation in space, which is associ- 

 ated with the body of the living organism, is only created 

 in the biosphere from natural living bodies which have 

 existed previously, that is, as a result of reproduction. Thus 

 our lack of success in bringing about the synthesis of a living 

 thing is due to the fact that the special asymmetric spatial 

 conditions required for the purpose are absent from our 

 laboratories. 



The question of the 'rightness and leftness' of living 

 substance deserves serious consideration and we shall return 

 to it later, but it must be pointed out here that at present 



