96 life's beginning on the earth 



This is just what Stanley of the Rockefeller Institute and 

 his group have recently demonstrated by their cyrstalliza- 

 tion experiments with the tobacco mosaic viruses and other 

 viruses as described above (see page 74). Since Oparin' s 

 book (in Russian) was published in 1936, and written prob- 

 ably a year earlier, it is likely that he had not yet heard of 

 Stanley's work at that time. 



It would also seem that the impossibility for any mono- 

 molecular form of life to develop on a non-living medium 

 has not yet been proven. We should realize that we can 

 observe only those mono-molecular forms of life which are 

 disease-producing: the filtrable viruses. There is no reason 

 to assume that they are the only ones which exist. 



We must be satisfied with our limited knowledge in this 

 line: we know that a "living molecule" is possible; hence, 

 the failure to cultivate filtrable viruses cannot be an objec- 

 tion to the assumption that mono-molecular forms of life 

 were the first ones to appear on our earth. 



Oparin assumes that the first forms of life to appear were 

 much larger. Concerning their formation, he has worked 

 out an ingenious hypothesis, the essential features of which 

 can be briefly summarized as follows. The organic sub- 

 stances present in the lifeless early ocean — like proteins, 

 etc. — were present there as "colloidal solutions" very much 

 like a protein solution in water in which molecular aggre- 

 gates ("micellae") are evenly distributed. Oparin assumes 

 further that by an interaction of various colloids, a segrega- 

 tion of liquid jelly-like masses occurred, tending to concen- 

 trate the organic matter in certain points. This was not an 

 irregular precipitation, but rather a segregation resembling 

 a crystallization with the colloidal "micellae" arranged in a 

 regular fashion; this must have been the case since regular- 

 ity of arrangement of the smallest particles is typical of any 

 living thing. Such colloidal droplets of matter, so-called 

 "coazervafes" as he terms them, should have gradually 



