ORIGIN OF LIFE ON THE SHORES OF THE OCEAN HI 



freezing in another. It keeps the wheels turning. Now the enzymes 

 of today are all proteins; the coenzymes of today are nearly all 

 what we call nucleotides, that is, triple complexes of a nitrogen 

 base, usually purines or pyrimidines, a sugar, and phosphoric acid; 

 much too complex a molecule to have existed in the beginning or 

 to have occurred by chance. 



Unless it is desired to push back the doctrine of special creation 

 to the creation of enzymes and coenzymes (there is a school that 

 would take one of these, namely the coenzyme in the polymerized 

 form as nucleic acid) as the beginning of life, unless then we are 

 prepared to take such an easy way out, we must assume that 

 before there were enzymes to carry out the catalytic reactions in 

 metabolism there were some other agents that did it, not so well, 

 but sufficiently well for the slow times of the origin of life. Simi- 

 larly, before there were any coenzymes there must have been some 

 other and less efficient means of transferring energy from place to 

 place, I think we are just beginning to see what these earlier forms 

 of such protoenzymes could be, thanks to the work of Calvin 

 (1959), Nicolaev (1959), and others. For the protoenzyme action 

 it would appear that iron coordination compounds are capable of 

 speeding up many chemical reactions by factors, not of ten 

 thousand but of five to a hundred. Such compounds of iron or of 

 other transition elements, copper and nickel, would form spon- 

 taneously from any solution in which there were nitrogenous 

 compounds of the type of amino acids or simple purines, and these 

 may well have been the protoenzymes. For the protocoenzyme 

 we have a clue in the presence of phosphoric acids, particularly of 

 the chain-linked metaphosphoric acids. These have the property, 

 in breaking up and re-forming, of liberating and absorbing energy 

 in the form of the so-called energy-rich phosphate bond. In my 

 view, therefore, the story of metabolism runs absolutely parallel 

 with the story of concentration leading to the formation of subvital 

 areas. In fact, it is only when we reach the coacervate stage that 

 we can talk of organisms. Before that I think we are quite right 

 to talk about life without organisms, an extensive form of life not 

 broken up into small packets. 



To interpret the subsequent stages which lead to some kind of 



