Session IV DISCUSSION 



A. I. Oparin (U.S.S.R.): 



It seems to me that our Symposium, so far, has shown that the problem of the essential 

 nature of life is inseparable from that of its emergence, that the essential nature of life 

 can only be understood in the light of its origin. As you have seen, however, it is a very 

 vexed question at what level of complexity of evolving matter hfe arose, whether it was 

 at the unimolccular or multimolecular level. 



Is life only inherent in the individual molecule of protein, nucleic acid or nuclco- 

 protein, and is the rest of the protoplasm merely a lifeless medium ? Or is life inherent 

 in a multimolecular system in which proteins and nucleic acids have an extremely im- 

 portant role, though it is that of a part, not that of the whole, just like the role of an organ 

 fulfilling a corresponding function in the whole organism. 



We may feel some regret that this gathering has not only not led to a merging of these 

 two points of view, but has not even led to their approaching one another. However, it 

 is clear that this required a great deal more work and would hardly have been possible 

 at our first meeting. 



Today I should like to formulate, in a couple of words, my own viewpoint which I 

 have expounded and substantiated in my book. I assumed that what had arisen primarily, 

 by abiogenic means, was not the functionally extremely efficiently constructed nucleic 

 acids or proteins which we can now isolate from organisms, but only polynucleotides or 

 polypeptides of a relatively disorderly structure, from which were formed the original 

 systems. It was only on the basis of the evolution of these systems that there developed 

 the functionally efficient forms of structure of molecules, not vice versa. 



In the opposite case one would have to conceive of evolution as it was imagined by 

 Empedocles, who held that first there developed arms, legs, eyes and ears and that later, 

 owing to their combination, the organism developed. 



I. MAlek (Czechoslovakia): 



Allow me to make a few small observations or, more accurately, to ask a question of the 

 biologists, biochemists and chemists: A vast number of dilferent reactions are charac- 

 teristic of living matter. These reactions are related to one another and to all parts of the 

 living material and chemical compounds, and also relate living material to the external 

 world. Thus, in living materials there are no isolated chemical compounds but, on the 

 contrary, there exists a dynamic association which is in constant motion. When we study 

 this dynamic system from the biochemical point of view, we have to divide it into separate 

 compounds or functional chains. We approach the study of the origin of this complicated 

 system in more or less the same way. We discuss the mode of origin of the separate com- 

 pounds of high molecular weight which characterize living materials — proteins, nucleic 

 acids, lipids and polysaccharides. In doing so we assume that they arose more or less 

 independently and that it was only when they had attained some degree of polymerization 

 that they could combine together and interact with one another. It has occurred to me 

 to question whether this is correct or whether it would not be better to suppose that the 

 relationships between the different compounds and their functions, which characterize 

 living material, arose, at least in part, at a lower stage in the development of matter and 



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