Investigation

Abstract

This book is a very condensed version of the author's ideas of the origin of life. In its essential content it differs little from his earlier publications, but he has been meticulous in incorporating up-to-date discoveries in astrophysics and biochemistry into the fabric of his theory. Oparin provides evidence for the existence of water and carbon compounds in the early Earth. He holds that, to begin with, oxygen was present in only infinitesimal amounts. Slowly there was brewed up what he calls a primaeval broth, largely under the influence of ultraviolet radiation (a matter which is very debatable in view of the instability of what are, and must have been, the chemical works of reference, namely the nucleic acids). In any case, forces of construction at that early period overcame forces of destruction: the large molecules that were formed were relatively stable, chiefly due to the absence of oxygen. The author pictures these large molecules coming together to form coacervates, isolated from the broth. Smaller molecules came to pass into these chemically open systems; they were incorporated, or changed, and these transmutations contributed in some instances to the stabilization of the coacervate. The reader is left to decide what constituted the coacervate, and what could have been its needs. The problem of the early relationship between proteins and nucleic acids is passed