The origin of life on the earth

THE ORIGIN OF LIFE ON THE EARTH THE ORIGIN OF LIFEON THE EARTHA. I. OPARIN ACTIVE MEMBER OF THE ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE U.S.S.R. THIRD REVISED AND ENLARGED EDITION Translated from the Russian by ANN S YN GE ACADEMIC PRESS INC., PUBLISHERS NEW YORK • 1957 IOLIVER & BOYD LTD. Tweeddale Court, High Street Edinburgh i, Scotland Edition for all of the Americas, except Canada Published by ACADEMIC PRESS INC. Ill Fifth Avenue New York 3, New York ALL RIGHTS RESERVED This book may not be reproduced by any means, in whole or part, without the written permission of the Publishers PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN AT THE CENTRAL PRESS (ABERDEEN) LTD. FOR OLIVER AND BOYD LTD., EDINBURGH PREFACE My FIRST WORK on the origin of life was published as a small booklet in 1924 {Proiskhozhdenie zhizni. Moscow: Izd. Moskovskii Rabochii). In it I for- mulated, though very schematically, the essentials of this problem. I explained these propositions in an expanded form in my book Vozniknovenie zhizni na zemle [The origin of life on the Earth) (Moscow: Izd. AN SSSR), the first edition of which was published in 1936. The second edition was published in 1941 without substantial alteration. After a lapse of 20 years there has accumulated a very large amount of factual material bearing on the origin of life derived from various fields of scientific endeavour. This allows us to draw a considerably more definite picture of the successive stages in the development of matter on the way to the origin of life. The 1941 edition of the book has, accordingly, been thoroughly revised in the light of this new factual material. The only important features which have been retained from the earlier editions are the fundamental ideas and propositions. I wish to express my profound thanks to Professors N. M. Sisakyan, A. G. Pasynskii, A. N. Belozerskii, V. L. Kretovich and G. A. Deborin for looking over particular chapters of the book and for their valuable criticisms and advice, and also to all my colleagues in the A.N. Bach Institute of Biochemistry of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. who have helped me in my work on this edition. I wish also to make special recognition of the hard and valuable work expended on this task by Candidate in Biological Sciences N. S. Gel'man. Vi PREFACE In connection with the English language edition of the book I should like to extend my hearty thanks to Mrs. Ann Synge for her work in translating it and also to the publishers, Messrs. Oliver and Boyd. A. Oparin 16.10.56. :oSTRANSLATOR'S PREFACE pi. THIS BOOK is a complete translation of the text of the third and completely revised edition of Professor Oparin's book, although some of the illustrations have been left out. The Russian and English editions should appear more or less simultaneously. The first edition was translated into English by Professor Sergius Morgulis and was published under the title The origin of life by the Macmillan Company (New York, 1938). It was reprinted by Dover Publications Inc. (New York, 1953). I could not have undertaken this translation unaided and have received much help from many sources. My husband has helped at all stages. In particular, he has dealt with the bibliogTaphy and checked the spelling of all proper names which had to be transliterated from the Russian alphabet. He writes: "Transliteration of Russian names is by the system used in Chemical Abstracts (see annual author index). Titles of periodicals have been abbreviated, in general, as in the World list of scientific periodicals published in the years ipoo-ip^o (London (Butterworth Scientific Publications), 1952). However, for most Russian journals the abbreviations are as in Chemical Abstracts (see indexes for 1951 and 1956) ; these will be found as good, or better, for tracing the periodicals in the World list itself. Alternative transliterations of the names of authors are given in brackets where this seems bibliographically helpful. Where the author cites Russian review articles and books I would like to have included supplementary references to works more accessible to English readers, but circumstances have prevented me from doing this in more than a few instances. In connection with verifying the references I am grateful for their unstinted help to many librarians, and especially to the staffs of the Reid Library, Bucksburn, and of the Library of the University of Aberdeen." I have also received advice and help from Mr. N. W. Pirie, who read the typescript, and from Dr. H. Lees and Mr. VU viii translator's preface M. V. Tracey who read the proofs. My technical and ter- minological advisers are in no way responsible for the views expressed in the book. I hope their, perhaps unconscious, attempts to use it as a platform for their own scientific views have not distracted me from an accurate presentation of Professor Oparin's ideas. He has, in any case, checked the translation in detail from beginning to end. The following illustrations are reproduced by courtesy of the authors and publishers cited: nos. 4 and 5, McGraw-Hill Book Co. Inc.; no. 10, the Director of Lund Observatory, on behalf of the late Dr. W. Gyllenberg; no. 20, Prof. Linus Pauling and the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A.; nos. 23 and 24, Prof. G. Schramm and the Editors of Nature; no. 25, Dr. F. H. C. Crick and the Editors of Nature; no. 26, the Publisher of The Scientific American; nos. 31 and 32, the Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology ; no. 34, Dr. M. Yeas and the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A.; no. 35, the Springer-Verlag, Vienna; nos. 38, 39, 41, 42, 43 and 44, the Academic Press Inc. My thanks are due to all those I have mentioned and to my teacher, Mrs. Vera Raitt, who has helped me in my struggles with the Russian language, as well as to many others who have helped with typing, illustrations, references and other matters, not forgetting the publishers, Messrs. Oliver and Boyd, who have made strenuous efforts to get the book out in time for the first international Symposium on the Origin of Life, organised by the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. under the auspices of the International Union of Biochemistry. Ann Synge Aberdeen, April 1957. INTRODUCTION The question of the emergence of Ufe, of the origin on the Earth of the first hving things, raises a number of important and fundamental problems of natural philosophy. Every man, whatever his stage of development, has, consciously or unconsciously, put this question to himself and found some sort of answer to it, for without some such answer one cannot form even the most primitive picture of the world. History shows that the problem of the emergence of life has fascinated the human mind from time immemorial. There has been no religious or philosophic system and no great thinker that has not devoted serious attention to this problem. In different epochs and at different stages of cul- tural development the question of the origin of life has been answered in different ways. This problem has however always been the focus of a bitter conflict of ideas between two irreconcilable schools of philosophy—the conflict between idealism and materialism. At the beginning of our century this conflict did not merely fail to abate but took on a special bitterness because, although science had already achieved glittering and dizzy successes in many fields, it seerned unable to give a rational, scientifically based answer to the question of the origin of life. It appeared that a dead end had been reached as far as this problem was concerned. Such a state of affairs was by no means fortuitous. It may be explained as follows. About a century ago almost everybody held that the principle of spontaneous generation prevailed so far as the origin of life was concerned. They were convinced that living things could originate, not only from others like themselves, but that they could also come into being spontaneously, appearing all at once, fully formed and organised, among inanimate objects. Both idealists and materialists held this point of view. The only point of dispute was : what was the cause and what the nature of the forces determining this coming into being. X INTRODUCTION According to the idealistic way of thinking all living things, including human beings, originally came into being in more or less the same form in which we now see them, owing to the effect of supernatural spiritual forces, that is to say as the result of a creative act by a deity, formative originating spirit, life force, entelechy or some such concept. In other words, they arose as the result of the influence of a primary spiritual cause which was, itself, according to the idealists, the essence of life. In opposition to this, the materialistically minded scientists and philosophers set out from the premise that life is material in nature like everything else in the world, and that no spiritual force need be invoked to explain its origin. As most of them accepted spontaneous generation as a fully confirmed ' fact ', they had to explain it as the result of the action of natural laws, while denying the intervention of any spiritual force whatever. It seemed to them that the most direct approach to a solution of the problem of the origin of life was to find in nature, or produce in the laboratory, instances of spontaneous generation, and to study the phenomenon by all the available scientific methods. However, very accurate observations and experiments, especially the researches of Louis Pasteur, demonstrated conclusively the illusory nature of the very ' fact ' of the spontaneous generation of even the most primitive organisms from inanimate material. It was established with complete certainty that all previous reports of the occurrence of spontaneous generation had been the fruit of errors of method, incorrect setting up of experiments or superficial interpretation of them. This removed the ground from under the feet of those students of nature who saw spontaneous generation as the only conceivable way in which life could have arisen. After Pasteur they lost all possibility of an experimental approach to the solution of this problem and this led them to form very pessimistic conclusions and to assert that the problem of the origin or life was * accursed ' and that it was an insoluble question unworthy of the work of any serious investigator and to study it would be simply a waste of his time.