A Brief History of Creation

by Bill Mesler

  THE UNIQUE PERSPECTIVES on biology held by Haldane and Oparin were shaped by the very different scientific worlds in which the two men worked. In the Soviet Union, the field of genetics was increasingly seen as a “bourgeois science,” based on a kind of “survival of the fittest” model that was anathema to the Marxist ideal. In the West, the study of genetics was revolutionizing biology, and Haldane was one of the field’s most important elaborators and theorists.

  Though the basic tenets of genetics had been elaborated in the mid-nineteenth century by the Franciscan friar Gregor Mendel, his work had gone almost entirely unnoticed until 1900, when several scientists independently realized the importance of what Mendel had discovered. The concept was quickly embraced, and by 1906, scientists were using the term “gene” to describe the unit of inheritance.

  Haldane had been on the forefront of genetics since the very beginning. In 1901, when he was nine, his father had taken him to one of the earliest lectures on Mendel’s theory. Genetics became one of his favorite subjects and remained so for the rest of his life, occupying much of his writing and experimental work. Haldane was instrumental in establishing the interlocking relationship between Darwin’s theory of natural selection and Mendel’s theory of heredity.

  Acceptance of genetics in the Western world was swift. The basic concepts were easy enough to explain and to prove, even to a child of nine like Haldane. Yet, by the mid-1920s, the study of the gene was increasingly being brushed aside in the Soviet Union, where Joseph Stalin was forcing the scientific establishment more and more to conform to his totalitarian view of Marxism, in which genetics and “survival of the fittest” were seen at odds with the utopian vision of absolute equality.

  The worst excesses of the period were personified in one scientist in particular, the agronomist Trofim Lysenko, who for two decades almost single-handedly managed to retard the science of genetics in the Soviet Union. The son of an illiterate peasant farmer, Lysenko was a little-known scientist working in the Ukraine when Pravda first profiled him in a 1927 article on Soviet farming titled “The Fields in Winter”: “If one is to judge a man by first impression, Lysenko gives one the feeling of a toothache. All one remembers is his sullen look creeping along the earth as if, at the very least, he were ready to do someone in.” As Lysenko rose up the ranks of Soviet bureaucracy through brutal Machiavellianism and Stalinist sycophancy, the description proved to be remarkably prescient.

  Lysenko was one of the holdouts of Lamarck’s increasingly marginalized theory of acquired characteristics. Lamarckian theory was central to Lysenko’s attempts to breed crops that would be more resilient in winter. His claims that he had developed a method to convert spring wheat into winter wheat proved disastrous for Russian agriculture, which was already reeling from the inefficiencies of mass collectivization. In the years to follow, millions died of starvation.

  Yet Lysenko shrewdly used his peasant background to endear himself to Stalin and quickly rose to a commanding position in the Soviet biological sciences. The results of his stewardship were catastrophic. Most scientists working under Lysenko caved in to the climate of fear, adjusting their theories to conform to Marxist dogma as expounded by men like Lysenko. Those who did not sometimes paid with their lives.

  One of Lysenko’s victims was Nikolai Vavilov, the geneticist who had sponsored Haldane on his first trip to Russia. Vavilov was one of the most prominent Mendelian holdouts to resist Lysenko, though he otherwise bent over backward to win the Ukrainian’s favor. Vavilov had even sponsored Lysenko’s membership in the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. In 1940, Vavilov was nevertheless arrested on charges of espionage. A sentence of death by firing squad was commuted to twenty years in prison. He died two years later of starvation. By 1948, nearly all geneticists were being called before Communist Party meetings and forced to recant.

  Oparin’s role in Lysenko’s reign of terror remains a dark stain on his career. The two men shared summer dachas together and were known to be friendly, though in the Orwellian world of Stalinist Russia, it was hard to know how much of their friendliness was genuine. Marxism certainly affected Oparin’s work. Especially in his early years, Oparin really did seem to be the kind of true-believer communist scientist that became so rare in the later days of the Soviet Union, after years of oppression had squeezed out what little authentic idealism the scientific community could muster. In some ways, Oparin’s broad approach to the question of the origin of life could be traced to his embrace of Marx’s historical dialectic. He was probably helped by the fact that scientists in the Soviet Union tended to be less trapped into a single discipline than their Western counterparts were. In his emphasis on the slow but deliberate evolutionary steps that led from nonlife to life, Oparin tried to keep close to a theory on the origin of life that had been posited by Marx’s collaborator Friedrich Engels in his book Dialectics of Nature. Though Oparin never incorporated Lysenko’s theories into his own work, until the 1950s he shied away from touching on the questions of genetics that would come to dominate origin-of-life research by the end of the century.¶

  Many scientific dissidents saw Oparin as, at worst, a close ally of Lysenko and, at best, an enabler. His many friends in the increasingly internationalized community of scientists searching for the origin of life found his complicity in the darkest excesses of Lysenkoism hard to reconcile with the kind and warmhearted man who managed to charm almost everyone he encountered.

  FOR HALDANE, the long descent of the world’s most prominent communist state into the madness of Lysenkoism proved too much to bear. In 1948, in the wake of the Lysenko-inspired war on genetics in the Soviet Union, Haldane had been forced to give a private recantation of genetics at a British Communist Party meeting. He quit the party the following year.

  Yet Haldane never abandoned the general framework of his left-wing ideals. Disgusted with the British invasion of Egypt during the Suez Crisis in 1956, Haldane emigrated to India, where he found the moderate socialism of the Indian Congress Party to his liking. Haldane took to his adopted country, becoming a vegetarian and dressing himself in a traditional skirt-like dhoti, which occasionally caused him to be mistaken for a guru. He liked to joke that his emigration was spurred by the desire to stop wearing socks. “Sixty years in socks is enough,” he once wrote. After his death, a prominent road in front of South Asia’s largest science center—Science City, near Kolkata—was named after him.

  In 1963, Haldane was asked to speak at a series of conferences and meetings on the subject of the origin of life that were being held in the United States. One of the events was at the Institute of Biological Sciences in North Carolina. Since state law prohibited members of the Communist Party from speaking at functions that had received state funding, Haldane was asked whether he was now or ever had been a member of the Communist Party. He refused to answer the question, pointing out in his reply that the Soviet Union did not ask visiting lectures if they were members of the Conservative Party. He went on to say that he would “use the incident for propaganda against the present set-up in your country, which is of course, in flat contradiction of the principles laid down by your Founding Fathers.”

  Despite the episode in North Carolina, Haldane managed to complete the rest of his journey without incident, including his final stop, a conference on the origin of life in Wakulla Springs, Florida, a rural town outside of Tallahassee. The conference organizer, a NASA-supported chemist named Sidney Fox, had also invited Oparin. Although they had corresponded for decades, Oparin and Haldane had never actually met in person.

  Oparin was the opening speaker, and Haldane introduced him. “I suppose that Oparin and I may be regarded as ancient monuments in this branch of science, but there is considerable difference,” Haldane said. “Whereas I know nothing serious about it, Dr. Oparin has devoted his life to this subject.” Haldane left the conference early, after experiencing abdominal pains. At a hospital in Tallahassee, he was told he had cancer. He died within the year.

  THE HY
POTHESIS developed by Oparin and Haldane created a new framework for understanding the origin of life. It was a modern attempt to imagine the environmental conditions in which life might have arisen, conditions extremely different from those imagined by most of their predecessors. Although a full elaboration of the true workings of the cell would wait until the second half of the century, both men drew upon an increasingly sophisticated understanding of cellular mechanics. Still, despite proposing ideas that represented a major theoretical breakthrough, they did little to advance the subject experimentally. Haldane never engaged in any experiments on the subject, while Oparin’s attempts yielded little of consequence and were not generally held in wide regard. But their ideas galvanized a new generation of researchers into the field. Soon their hypothesis was buoyed by one of the most famous experiments of the twentieth century.

  * From those same experiments, Buffon estimated that in 93,291 years, the Earth would become too cold to support life.

  † For an exhibit on the origin of life in the 1980s, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum played on Haldane’s theory by enlisting Julia Child for a short film in which the famous television chef taught viewers how to make “primordial soup.”

  ‡ Various other acronyms are sometimes used, reflecting the other elements. SCHNOPs and SPONCH highlight the presence of sulfur and phosphorus.

  § Although Pasteur had developed antiviral vaccines, he was unaware of the existence of actual viruses. The first experimental evidence for viruses was not available until 1892, when Russian botanist Dmitri Ivanovsky showed that sap from infected tobacco plants that had been put through a filter capable of removing all the bacteria still had the power to spread disease.

  ¶ In a 1971 interview with science historian Loren Graham, Oparin defended his actions during the Lysenko period as a practical necessity. “If you had been there during those years,” he said, “would you have had the courage to speak out and be imprisoned in Siberia?”

  A LABORATORY EARTH

  If there were in nature a progressive force, an eternal urge, chemistry would find it. But it is not there.

  —WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN, 1925, undelivered closing argument at the Scopes Monkey Trial

  IN THE SPRING OF 1953, a young graduate student by the name of Stanley Miller walked into the Kent Hall lecture room at the University of Chicago. Miller was nervous. He was just twenty-three and was about to address some of the most accomplished scientists in the United States. Chicago’s chemistry department was one of the most prestigious in the world. During World War II, the university had been a focal point of the American atomic weapons program. Scores of top scientists had stayed on or had become affiliated with the university after the war.

  Many of the most important figures in the Manhattan Project were in the audience for Miller’s lecture, including several winners of the Nobel Prize and several more who would win that highest honor of science in the years to come. Most prominent among them was the man sometimes called the “father of the nuclear bomb,” Enrico Fermi. In 1942, Fermi had built the world’s first nuclear reactor just down the road, under the bleachers of the university’s old football stadium, Stagg Field. It was a remarkably simple device, little more than uranium pellets and graphite blocks arranged in a pile, from which it took its name, Chicago Pile-1.

  Over the previous year, Miller had been working on the question of the origin of life as part of his PhD thesis project. Since the fall of 1952, word had spread throughout the university that Miller had successfully executed an experiment showing how life might have arisen under the primitive conditions of the early Earth. Using nothing more than a glass apparatus, an electric Tesla coil, and some simple gases, he had created amino acids, the basic building blocks of proteins. But there was more than a little incredulity in the audience. As they waited for Miller to appear, some scientists speculated among themselves about what Miller must have done wrong. Some guessed that he had been misled by contamination or had misinterpreted the results of his experiment. At the end of his presentation, Miller was bombarded with questions. Many of those were fielded by his doctoral adviser, the Nobel Prize–winning chemist Harold Urey, another key figure from the atomic bomb program. His presence lent the experiment the weight of his substantial scientific reputation.

  The questions started to slow to a trickle as it dawned on the once-doubtful audience that they were indeed privy to an experiment that was sure to have historic impact. One of the last questions came from Fermi, a friend of Urey’s since their days working on the Manhattan Project together. Fermi asked if this was indeed the way life had come about on the planet Earth or if it was simply a way that life might have appeared. “If God did not do it this way,” answered Urey, “then he missed a good bet.”

  JUST TWO YEARS before the experiment that would make him one of the most famous scientists in America, Stanley Miller was still an undergraduate at the University of California at Berkeley. He might never have left, had it not been for lack of money. He had grown up just miles away in Oakland, and both his parents were UC alumni. His father, an assistant district attorney, had been a friend to Earl Warren, the future governor and Supreme Court justice, who lived nearby and whose children Miller often played with as a child. But his father passed away in 1946, and graduate school became out of the question unless Miller could secure a paid position as a teaching assistant. Only two schools made him an offer, and he ended up at the University of Chicago.

  There, Miller found himself under the wing of the physicist Edward Teller, part of the coterie of Manhattan Project scientists that found an academic home at the university. For the next year, under the guidance of Teller as his academic adviser, Miller turned to the question of the origin of the elements and how they might have initially formed within stars. In 1952, Teller left Chicago to head the secret American hydrogen bomb program. With Teller gone, Miller found himself without a mentor. His doctoral topic seemed no closer to completion than when he had begun the previous year, and he started to think about new subjects for his dissertation. He remembered a seminar he had attended about the early composition of the planets, in which Professor Urey had mused about the chemical composition of the Earth when life had first appeared.

  Urey was an accomplished enough scientist that he stood out even in the university’s star-studded chemistry department. His work on isotope separation and isolation of the heavy isotope of hydrogen, deuterium, had earned him a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1934. During the war, he had served as the director of the Special Alloyed Materials Laboratory at Columbia University, the branch of the Manhattan Project charged with enriching uranium for the first atomic bombs.

  Urey was a chemist, but he never attached much importance to labels or specializations. His first degree was in zoology, and he initially hoped to study psychology. When he worked in the laboratory of the famous Danish chemist Niels Bohr, Bohr mistakenly assumed that Urey was a physicist. Ever since arriving in Chicago, Urey had found himself increasingly drawn to understanding the early development of the solar system and the origins of the planets.

  At the lecture that inspired Miller, Urey had discussed the theories of Alexander Oparin, remarking offhandedly that it was almost amazing that nobody had seen fit to actually test what Oparin was proposing. The remark stuck with Miller, and he decided to approach Urey about taking up the challenge. This was a bit of a leap, since Miller had never been fond of experimental work. He had gravitated toward working with Teller because the professor shared his love of theory. Nonetheless, Miller would one day be remembered as having designed one of the most celebrated experiments of twentieth-century chemistry.

  Urey agreed to take over as Miller’s thesis adviser, but he balked at the young man’s plan to hang progress toward his PhD on an experiment that Urey felt held perilously little prospect for success. Few had attempted to approach the problem of the origin of life experimentally since the days of the spontaneous-generation controversies of the late nineteenth century.
Most capable scientists still saw the question of the origin of life as one not easily tackled by experiment or observation, making it something of an anomaly in the biological sciences. Chemistry was an experimental science, tending to focus on hands-on subjects: biological or geological phenomena well suited for careful observation. Pure theory was for physicists. The problem of the origin of life, on the other hand, was remarkably remote and obscure. Urey tried to steer Miller into a less ambitious course of study involving measuring the abundance of the element thallium in meteorites.

  Yet Urey could also appreciate Miller’s ambition. He often said that great scientists were great because they set themselves to tackling the big problems of science. A nuclear reaction, Urey liked to point out, was no more complex than any other kind of chemical reaction, only more important. He and Miller eventually reached a compromise. Miller would have a year to show results or he would switch his topic to the more achievable subject of thallium.