Origin of Life on the Shores of the Ocean 



Physical and Chemical Conditions Determining First 

 Appearance of Biological Processes 



J. D. BERNAL 



Birkbeck College, University of London, London 



THE general account which I shall give here of the origin of life 

 on the shores of the ocean is an attempt to picture only the very 

 earliest stages of the origin of life, that is, those which mark the 

 transition from the inorganic to the organic. I shall not attempt 

 to discuss the complicated biochemical problems of the later 

 stages in the origin of life, the origin of the genetic apparatus, of 

 the cellular organelles, or of cells themselves. Consequently, this 

 will be essentially a simple account, where I shall link what we 

 know from physical oceanography about oceans and their shores, 

 with what we know from geochemistry and geophysics. To see this 

 in its setting of the whole process of biopoesis or life-making 

 I would, however, like to summarize the picture I have of the 

 process as one divided into stages. This is shown more or less 

 arbitrarily in Table I, which is modified from that presented two 

 years ago at the Symposium on the Origin of Life in Moscow 

 (Bernal, 1959). 



I distinguish seven logical stages in the origin of life which are 

 shown with corresponding features in the external environment 

 and in the molecular developments inside the pre-organismal seas 

 and in the organisms that arose from them. The first stage is the 

 proto-organic phase, when the smallest organic molecules such as 

 amino acids, purines, and sugars are being synthesized from the 

 inorganic molecules HoO, CO2, NH3 occurring in the original 

 hydrosphere and atmosphere. The second stage I envisage as the 

 concentration of some of the more complicated molecules into 



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