Revelation, Rationality, Knowledge & Truth — Page 367
ORIGIN OF LIFE – DIFFERENT THEORIES AND PROPOSITIONS the primitive oceans reached the consistency of a hot, dilute soup (primordial soup). 2. The outcome of Haldane's research was published in 1929 in the Rationalist Annual but no serious note was taken of it in scientific circles. A few years before Haldane,. A. I. Oparin, a Soviet scientist, had also published a small monograph in Russia in 1924, proposing similar ideas concerning the origin of life. This article too was met with no better fate. Both had simultaneously and independently worked on the problem of how organic material could have been synthesized from inorganic material before the beginning of biotic evolution. . A. New Landmark. After Oparin and Haldane, other scientists rose to fame by taking up the same inquiry all over again. . During this period, it was undoubtedly Harold C. Urey of the American University of Chicago, who made the greatest theoretical contribution in this field. He restated the OparinHaldane thesis in his book The Planets³ and resurrected the interest of the scientists in their pioneer research concerning the issue of the origin of life. In practical research however, it was Stanley L. Miller, a pupil of Urey, who stole the limelight in 1953. He, in accordance with Urey's theory recreated the atmospheric semblance of the primitive earth in a sealed glass apparatus. He filled it with a few litres of methane, ammonia and hydrogen gases, representing the atmosphere which scientists thought had then existed. To this mixture he added some water. A spark discharge device simulated lightning while a heated coil kept the water bubbling. Within a few days a reddish precipitate began to stain the glass which on analysis, to the utter delight of. Miller, was found rich in amino acids. It is amino acids, one should remember, which link up together to form 356