Return to the Stars: Evidence for the Impossible (4 page)

Other scientists used nitrogen instead of ammonia, formaldehyde or even carbon dioxide instead of methane. Miller's electrical discharges were replaced by supersonic waves or ordinary light waves concentrated into one beam. There was no change in the results! All the different primitive atmospheres, none of which contained a trace of organic life, produced amino acids and nitrogen-free organic carbonic acids every time. In some experiments the specially treated atmosphere even produced sugar.

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Figure 1

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What are we to make of this phenomenon?

Ever since man has been able to think, he has tried to evaluate everything around him in terms of polarity: light versus dark, heat versus cold, life against death. The habit of describing all living matter as 'organic' and all inanimate matter as 'inorganic' also falls into the broad field of this evaluation by polarities. But just as there are many intermediate stages between all extreme designations, it has long been impossible to draw a rigid boundary line between organic and inorganic chemistry.

When our planet began to cool off, what we call the 'primitive atmosphere' was formed from the light matter whose gas molecules were swirling about in confusion. It consisted mainly of those ingredients from which Miller brewed up his primitive soup in his laboratory experiments. Owing to the original high temperatures of the earth and its weak gravity, light gases such as helium and free hydrogen were lost in the cosmos, while the heavy gas molecules such as nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide and also the heavier 'noble' gas atoms were retained. Hydrogen in its free state, its elementary form, is now virtually nonexistent in our atmosphere; it is only found in chemical combinations. For example, two atoms of hydrogen together with one atom of oxygen form a molecule of the essential compound water (chemical symbol: H2O).

The cycle got under way. Water evaporated and rose with the warm radiation from the earth in clouds of vapour which cooled off at great heights and poured down as rain. This primitive rain freed many kinds of inorganic matter from the hot stone crust and swept them into the ocean. Inorganic compounds such as ammonia and cyanide of hydrogen from the atmosphere also dissolved in the primitive ocean and took part in chemical reactions. For millions of years the earth's atmosphere grew richer in oxygen.

This development took place slowly. Today science is unanimous in saying that the transformation of the original atmosphere into our oxidising atmosphere took about 1.2 milliard years. At the beginning of this development was the primitive soup, which, with its numerous forms of matter in solution, was a first-class culture medium for the first primitive forms of life.

It is said that life is always connected with an organism, in the simplest case with the organism's cell. The fact that an organism lives is proved by its metabolism, and also shows in its development. Functions constitute life. Are all these currently accepted criteria necessarily correct? If they are, a virus does not live. A virus itself undergoes no change of matter and energy; it does not eat nor does it excrete. It only multiplies inside foreign cells by reproduction. It is a parasite.

What then is life?

Shall we ever be able to define it?

If we follow the path of the origin of life in its main stages, the vital question is: whence the first living cell? Theodor Schwann (1810-1882) and Matthias Schleiden (1804-1881) carried out the fundamental research. Schwann proved that animals and plants are made up of cells; Schleiden recognised the importance of the nucleus. Then the Augustine prior Gregor Johann Mendel (1822-1884), who taught natural history and physics at Brim, made his cross-breeding experiments with peas and beans. This progressive priest discovered three laws of heredity with his patient experiments and became the founder of the science of heredity. Today his laws are unanimously accepted as governing men, animals and plants.

About the middle of the nineteenth century it was proved that the cell is the carrier of all vital functions. This proof became the basis for all the big biological discoveries. Now new techniques (Rontgenology, electrophoresis, ultra-microscopy, phase-contrast microscopy, etc.) enable us to examine cells and nuclei.

We suspect that the information centres for the storing and transmission of hereditary factors are in the cells and the nuclei.

Research in this field, which is still comparatively recent, found out that every organism has a specific number of chromosomes, which have their own specific shape. Chromosomes are the carriers of hereditary factors. For example, the cells of the human body have 23 pairs of chromosomes = 46 chromosomes, a bee's cells have 8 pairs = 16 chromosomes, a sheep's cells 27 pairs = 54 chromosomes.

The protein molecules of the cells consist of chains of amino acids. Given this piece of scientific information, we were faced with the new question of how living cells originated from amino acids.

In connection with the only partially solved problem of how protein could come into being before there were living cells, Rutherford Platt describes the theory held by Dr George Wald of Harvard University. Wald assumed that under certain natural conditions amino acids must give the answer. Dr S.W. Fox of the Institute for Molecular Evolution, Miami, tested this idea by drying out solutions of amino acids. Fox and his collaborators observed that the amino acids formed long thread-like sub-microscopic structures. They had formed chain compounds containing hundreds of amino molecules. Dr Fox called them 'protenoids', i.e. protein-like matter.

Following the investigations of Professors J. Oro and A. P. Kimball, the chemists Dr Matthews and Dr Moser succeeded in producing protein matter from poisonous prussic acid and water in 1961. Three scientists from the Salk Institute, Robert Sanchez, James Ferris and Leslie Orgel, managed to produce synthetically the nucleic acids essential for metabolism and reproduction—those combinations of nucleic bases, carbohydrates and phosphoric acid occurring in the nuclei.

After our brief canter through chemistry and biology, the main thing for the reader to have grasped is that the construction of a living organism is a chemical process. 'Life' can be produced in laboratories. But what connection have nucleic acids with life?

Nucleic acids determine the complicated process of heredity. The sequence of four bases—adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine—gives the genetic code for all forms of life. Once this discovery was made, chemistry was able to remove a great deal of the mystery surrounding life.

There are two groups of nucleic acids whose names have become familiar to every assiduous newspaper reader: RNA (ribosenucleic acid) and DNA (deoxyribosenucleic acid). Both RNA and DNA are necessary for the synthesis of protein in the cells. It is a fact that the proteins of all organisms examined so far are built up of about twenty amino acids and that the sequence, or arrangement, of amino acids in a protein molecule is determined by the sequence of the four bases in the DNA ( = the genetic code).

But even if we know the structure of the genetic code, we are still a long way from being able to read the information stored in a chromosome. Nevertheless the thought that twenty amino acids are the bearers of all life and that their own arrangement in protein molecules is laid down in the genetic code is earth-shaking. In his book The Biological Timebomb George Rattray Taylor quotes the views of the Nobel prize-winners Dr Max Perutz and Professor Marshall W. Nierenberg on the tremendous possibilities that lie ahead.

Dr Max Perutz says: 'There are about one hundred million pairs of nucleotide bases distributed among forty-six chromosomes in a single human cell. How could we erase a specific gene from one particular chromosome, or add one to it, or repair a single pair of nucleotides? It hardly seems practicable to me.'

Professor Marshall W. Nierenberg, who played a vital role in the discovery of the genetic code, has a quite different opinion. 'I have no doubt that the difficulties can be overcome one day. The only question is when. I imagine that we shall succeed in programming cells with synthetic genetic information within the next twenty-five years.'

Lastly Joshua Lederberg, Professor of Genetics at Stanford University in California, is convinced that we shall be able to manipulate all our hereditary factors within the next ten or twenty years.

At all events, we have now realised that an insight into hereditary factors and their transformation is possible. And since we human beings know this, there is really no reason why an extraterrestrial intelligence that is familiar with space travel and consequently thousands of years ahead of us scientifically should not know it too.

In their book You will live to see it, the physicist and mathematician Herman Kahn, Director of the Hudson Institute of New York, and Anthony J. Wiener, adviser to the American government and also a member of the Hudson Institute, quote the Washington Post for 31.10.66, which described the possible results of manipulating the genetic code:

'Within ten or fifteen years a housewife will be able to go into a special store, look through a selection of packets like seed packets and choose her child by the label. Each packet will contain a one-day-old frozen embryo and on the label the buyer will be able to read the colour of hair and eyes, the size of body and IQ she can expect. There will also be a guarantee that the embryo has no hereditary defects. The woman will take the embryo of her choice to her doctor and have him implant it. Then it will grow in her body for nine months just like her own child.'

Such forecasts of the future are possible because the DNA contains genetic information for building the cells, as well as all the other hereditary factors. The DNA is a perfect 'punched card' for the structure of all life. For it not only codifies the twenty amino acids, but also announces the beginning and end of a protein chain with 'start' and 'stop', like a punched card prepared for a modern accounting machine. And just as the central unit of an electronic calculator contains a control bit whose job is to check all the calculating operations, there is a constant check On the functioning of the DNA chains in the cells.

James D. Watson, who investigated the structure of the DNA molecule so brilliantly at the age of twenty-four, has described the course of his work in his book The Double Helix. For the 900-word article in Nature, in which Watson described the bizarre spiral staircase shape of the DNA molecule, he and his fellow-workers received the Nobel Prize in 1962. Yet his book came within an ace of not being published. The board of the Harvard University Press opposed his frank way of describing things. They were afraid that the myth of ascetic scientific research might be destroyed by Watson's uninhibited narrative. For he says quite bluntly that he owed his success mainly to the preliminary studies and mistakes of his colleagues.

A spectacular event took place in America in December 1967. President Lyndon B. Johnson personally announced a great scientific achievement at a press conference in these words:

'This will be one of the most interesting articles you have, ever read. An awe-inspiring achievement! It opens the door to new discoveries, to the disclosure of the fundamental secrets of life.'

What kind of event was so important that the President of the United States took such an interest in it?

Scientists of Stanford University at Palo Alto, California, had succeeded in synthesising the biologically active nucleus of a virus. Following the genetic pattern of a type of virus called Phi X 174, they had constructed from nucleotides one of the giant DNA molecules that control all vital processes. The Stanford University scientists put artificial virus nuclei into host cells. The artificial viruses developed just like natural ones. Parasites that they are, they bullied the host cells into producing millions of new viruses following the pattern of Phi X 174. Just as happens in an organism attacked by a virus infection, the artificial viruses burst through the host cells once they had used up their vital energy.

Obeying the orders given by the DNA molecule, the cells produced millionfold combinations of protein molecules from amino acids. Each new combination corresponded exactly to the programmed sample. The Californian scientists calculated that only one 'genetic misprint' occurred in the creation of one hundred million new cells.

Barely fifteen years after the explanation of the DNA structure by Watson, Crick and Wilkins, an important scientific discovery was made. The Nobel prizewinner Professor Kornberg and his colleagues succeeded in deciphering thousands of combinations of the genetic code for the virus Phi X 174. They had produced life in the laboratory in California.