This may be the “moment when life is born from matter”…A “shocking experiment” in which amino acids, which are absolutely necessary for life on earth, were created in “just a few days” (Kobayashi Norimasa) | Bluebacks | Kodansha (1 /2)

“The first life on Earth was born from the RNA world.”

There is a problem with this extremely popular scenario. The probability that RNA materials would connect correctly and become a “finished product” on the primitive Earth, where life did not exist, is extremely close to zero. If so, why did life come into being?

In order to think about this difficult problem rationally without seeing it as “God’s work,” the author proposes a second opinion on the “origin of life.” The thrilling interpretation was summarized in an easy-to-understand manner by Norimasa Kobayashi, known as a leading expert on astrobiology.Between life and non-life“is. To commemorate the publication of this book, we are introducing the highlights of the book several times. Last time, we mentioned proteins (amino acids) as molecules necessary for life, but how did they come to be on the primitive Earth? We would like to introduce a groundbreaking experiment that solved this mystery.

*This article is a restructured and re-edited version of “Between life and non-life: Did a “miracle” occur on Earth?” (Bluebacks).

The era of biological innovation “1953”

In 1953, when the double helix structure of DNA was discovered, other important biological discoveries were made. For example, British biochemist Frederick Sanger (1918-2013) developed a method to examine the amino acid sequence of proteins, and in that year, for the first time, he discovered the order in which the 51 amino acids of the protein insulin (a hormone produced in the pancreas) are arranged ( (primary structure) was announced.

It was also in this year that American chemist Stanley Miller (1930-2007) announced the synthesis of amino acids.

Miller earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 1951 and then enrolled in graduate school at the University of Chicago.

His choice was the laboratory of Harold Urey (1893-1981). Urey won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1934 for the discovery of deuterium, and had since shifted his research interests to astrochemistry.

Two theories about the early Earth’s atmosphere

Regarding the early Earth’s atmosphere, there are two theories: one that it was mainly composed of carbon dioxide and nitrogen, like the atmosphere of Mars, and the other that it was mainly composed of hydrogen-rich substances such as methane (CH4) and ammonia (NH3) There was a parallel theory that it was something called “strongly reducible,” but Yuri thought it was the latter.

Immediately after entering graduate school, Miller attended a seminar with Urey and heard that energy may have been added to the highly reducing atmosphere to produce organic matter, which was then collected in the ocean and created life. I was fascinated. During my first year in graduate school, I conducted theoretical research under another supervisor, but when that professor moved to another university, I moved to Yury’s laboratory.

There, Miller told Ury that he had experimented with creating organic matter from a reducing gas mixture. In response, Yuri persuaded him to do research that would definitely yield results, such as “analysis of thallium in meteorites,” rather than conducting research with unknown results, but Miller refused to back down. It was. Yuri finally gave in and decided to let Miller do whatever experiments he wanted on the condition that if no results were obtained within a year, he would change the subject.