A Brief History of Creation

by Bill Mesler

  * The presence of methane gas in Mars’s atmosphere would be confirmed in 2009 by NASA scientist Michael Mumma. Like Urey, Mumma was raised in the United Brethren Church, which had tried to discourage his pursuit of science.

  † Author note from H. James Cleaves II: As a graduate student, I was lucky enough to have had Miller as my PhD adviser at UC San Diego. He was extraordinarily kind to those he worked with, but never shy in his criticisms of those he disagreed with. He was also fearless in the lab. I was asked to repeat Miller’s experiment for an event celebrating its fiftieth anniversary. Miller had by that time suffered a stroke and was unable to explain the details of its execution. It took several weeks to figure out the details, and when the time came to flip the switch, Miller insisted on being present, along with some of his close friends. I was terribly worried some air might have entered the apparatus. My hope was to have everyone, including myself stand out in the hallway, connect a long extension cord to the Tesla coil, and flip the switch from a safe distance. Stanley would have none of it. I winced as I turned it on, fearing an explosion accompanied by shards of glass flying everywhere. Instead, I heard the faint buzzing sound of the spark jumping between the electrodes. We then all got our faces up quite close to the flask and were mesmerized by little wisps of condensation swirling around the spark, looking something like fog tumbling down the hills on the San Francisco Peninsula when it rolls in late in the afternoon.

  THE NUCLEIC ACID MONOPOLY

  All of today’s DNA, strung through all the cells of the earth, is simply an extension and elaboration of [the] first molecule.

  —LEWIS THOMAS, The Medusa and the Snail, 1969

  NEIL ARMSTRONG SAT in the command module of the Apollo 11 spacecraft and stared out the window at the surface of the moon. It had been three days since the mission launched from Earth, and the ship was now settled in orbit 60 miles above the moon, awaiting the moment when Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin would enter the landing module Eagle and begin their descent to the first extraterrestrial surface upon which a human being would ever stand.

  Below them lay a vast, bluish-tinted basin filled with hardened lava formed by ancient volcanic eruptions. It was the Mare Tranquillitatis, so named by the seventeenth-century Italian Jesuits Francesco Grimaldi and Giovanni Riccioli. The first map of it had appeared in Riccioli’s great almanac of astronomy, the Almagestum novum, in 1661. Misled by its color, the Italians had mistaken the basin for a sea.

  The Apollo 11 astronauts simply called the Mare Tranquillitatis by its English translation, the “Sea of Tranquility.” When they returned from the moon, they planned to bring a sample of it back with them to be studied by geologists and life scientists from NASA’s exobiology program. For the American public, simply landing on the moon would be enough. But for NASA scientists, especially the origin-of-life scientists in the exobiology program, the prospect of being able to study pieces of the moon was immeasurably enticing.

  Apollo 11 was the fifth manned space flight undertaken by the US space program. The previous mission, Apollo 10, had been a dress rehearsal for the lunar landing that Armstrong and his fellow astronauts were about to attempt. Lunar probes launched from Apollo 10 had taken detailed photographs of potential landing sites. NASA scientists had combed over the pictures, searching for the ideal landing spot for the next mission. Apollo 11 would be following an orbit that was roughly in line with the moon’s equator, so the landing spot had to be near enough to its trajectory that the landing craft would have sufficient fuel to make its descent. But they also wanted to choose a site with a wealth of geological features. Armstrong and Aldrin would have precious little time on the surface, and they were about to undertake what would amount to the most important geological survey in history. Even if everything went like clockwork, they would have just a little over two hours to gather as much of the moon’s geological diversity as they could.

  Evidence of past volcanic activity was enticing to the mission planners for the same reasons it had been enticing to men like Charles Darwin. The lava could preserve things that wouldn’t otherwise be found in normal rock formations. But the same volcanic formations that were so attractive to scientists back on Earth presented a challenge to the astronauts. One of the biggest dangers posed by the mission would be planting a fragile landing craft safely on the surface. The Sea of Tranquility represented a compromise. Despite its geological promise, the region wasn’t overwhelmingly mountainous, making it a relatively attractive site for the astronauts to land.

  Armstrong spent most of the trip to the moon poring over maps of the region. Now that they were comfortably in orbit, he could make out its features with his own eyes. With the moon now standing directly between Columbia and the sun, the landscape was bathed in a blue glow of light reflected off the Earth. Craters were clearly defined, almost three-dimensional in the earthshine. Aldrin was the first to make out the 3-mile-wide crater that marked their landing site. It looked rugged and ill suited for landing, as if the planners back at mission control, in their desire to acquire a good geological haul, had been too daring. But as the area gradually came under the direct light of the sun, it began to look less foreboding.

  The next day, Armstrong and Aldrin climbed aboard the Eagle, leaving the third member of the crew, Michael Collins, behind in command of Columbia. Their descent from orbit was problematic. The computer’s alarms sounded twice—the result of a hardware malfunction—and Armstrong had to take early manual control of the landing. As they flew closer to the site, they were dismayed to see that the area was strewn with boulders. That would no doubt please the geologists on Earth, but Armstrong knew it would make for a tricky landing. Nonetheless, he managed to skillfully guided the Eagle just 350 feet above a large cluster of rocks, touching down near a crater the size of a football field, big enough to pose an obstacle but too small to have been spotted on the maps made by Apollo 10. NASA personnel back at mission control in Houston waited in silence, knowing that the astronauts were in the middle of the most dangerous phase of the mission. Then they heard Neil Armstrong speak the first words ever spoken on the moon: “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”

  After a rest of about 2 hours, Armstrong and Aldrin began suiting up in the bulky space suits that had been designed for their moonwalk. Armstrong then descended down a ladder, flipping on a camera that had been mounted on the side of the ship. As he reached the bottom rung, he began to examine the surface. In training, he had been grilled to describe everything for the benefit of the scientists back at NASA. “The surface appears to be very, very fine grained as you get close to it,” he said. “It’s almost like a powder.”

  He hopped onto the surface and took a few steps. Some 240,000 miles away, most of America and much of the world sat breathlessly watching on television or listening on radios.* While sitting in the Eagle shortly after its touchdown, Armstrong had thought of what he would say when the historic moment arrived: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

  Without his suit, Armstrong would have died in seconds. Yet he was struck by the serenity of the scene that confronted him. The rising sun bathed the moonscape in bright light. It looked different from the pictures he had seen from the probes, and the lack of an atmosphere gave everything a clarity he had never experienced on the Earth. It was beautiful, if stark. Aldrin called it “magnificent desolation.”

  Armstrong began snapping pictures from a camera built into his space suit, but stopped when he was interrupted by a voice from mission control urging him to get on with his real work. They were in the middle of the most important geological survey in history, and it would have to be completed in the roughly two and a half hours the astronauts had before their supply of oxygen began to run out.

  From a pocket in his space suit, Armstrong took out a collapsible rod with a bag at one end. He began scooping dust and a couple of small rocks from the ground below him, until the sample bag was packed full of gray-black powder. Even if something went
awry and the moonwalk had to be aborted, the astronauts would at least return with this bag of what the scientists back at mission control called the “contingency sample.” After a series of other experiments, the astronauts went about a more discerning process of collecting what would be called the “documented sample.” A phone call from President Nixon had put them behind schedule, and they had to rush through what was supposed to be one of the most careful and deliberate phases of their excavation. Armstrong set about filling two more aluminum containers that the scientists had dubbed “rock boxes.” While Aldrin began hammering away at the surface with a core tube searching for a specimen that would provide scientists a picture of what lay just under the moon dust that represented a kind of topsoil, Armstrong hurried about with a long pair of tongs, grabbing the rocks that looked most interesting.

  Buzz Aldrin drives a core tube sampler into the lunar soil. Photographed by Neil Armstrong.

  THE ASTRONAUTS RETURNED TO Earth with 45.5 pounds of the lunar surface for the scientists at home, but there would be a delay before the business of serious study could begin. From the outset of the Apollo program, NASA officials had taken seriously Joshua Lederberg’s warnings of contamination from lunar bacteria. An elaborate quarantine center had been built at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, with a containment room for the lunar samples just down the way from the one that had been built for the astronauts themselves. In the case of the moon rocks, scientists had more to consider than the dangers of a lunar organism: contamination of the moon rocks themselves from microorganisms on Earth was a major concern, as it would taint the precious samples and could lead to misleading results.

  Three weeks after the Eagle lifted off from the moon, the samples were ready to be parceled out for study by four research groups in NASA’s exobiology program, each led by scientists who either had been or would be key figures in the search for the origin of life. Two of the teams were headed by scientists directly employed by NASA—one headed by geologist David McKay, who had personally trained Armstrong and Aldrin for their scientific work during their moonwalk; the other, by Sri Lankan chemist Cyril Ponnamperuma, who had become an important authority on the origin of life in NASA exobiology circles. A third box of samples was shipped off to UC San Diego, where they would be studied by a group led by Harold Urey, whose theories on the composition of the lunar environment had by then earned him the title “father of lunar science.” The fourth box of samples was delivered to the University of Miami, where it would be examined by a team headed by a colorful iconoclast named Sidney Fox, a six-foot-four chemist with a reputation as an absentminded professor, capable of spending hours in parking lots searching for his car and falling asleep in midsentence while standing up and delivering a lecture.

  Fox’s life story was almost as colorful as his personality. His father was a wig maker; his mother, a Ukrainian Jew who had fled tsarist Russia when she was just eleven years old, stowed away in a crate on board a steamship. Fox grew up in Los Angeles with a passion for music, particularly Benny Goodman–style big-band jazz and Broadway musicals. In his twenties, he dabbled in composing. While studying chemistry at UCLA, he even wrote the scores for several of the university’s well-received annual musical revues. In 1935, he received a phone call from Walt Disney Studios asking whether he would be interested in composing the score for a movie based on an old Brothers Grimm fairy tale. It was going to be called Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Fox was enthralled, but first he sought out the advice of his mentor at UCLA, a professor named Max Dunn. “You are going to make a choice between music and chemistry,” said Dunn. “And it is going to be chemistry.”

  After UCLA, Fox moved to the California Institute of Technology. Founded in 1891 as a vocational school, tiny Caltech had, in a few decades, transformed itself into a world-class scientific research institution. Despite its relatively small size, as of 2015, Caltech scientists had won thirty-four Nobel Prizes, and the university had the distinction of having the highest faculty citation rate in the world. Even by the time Fox arrived in the 1930s, it had attracted some of the most important scientific minds in the United States to its faculty, including two who were making remarkable strides toward understanding the way living things work on a subcellular level: the chemist Linus Pauling and the biologist Thomas Hunt Morgan. Pauling was a pioneer in quantum chemistry and, in later years, would become one of the key elaborators of the molecular structures that make up living cells. Morgan had won fame as an evolutionary biologist who had just won a Nobel Prize for discovering, in fruit flies, the precise role that chromosomes play in genetic inheritance. Both men exerted a strong influence on Fox and the shape of his future scientific work.

  At Caltech, Fox began to take a keen interest in evolution, particularly the prebiological history that resulted in what he often called the spontaneous appearance of the first life-forms. Fox was ambitious. He wanted to work in a field that would allow him to make a real impact. To Fox, the question of the origin of life was the central biological problem, precisely the sort of question that so many other scientists avoided and nobody seemed close to being able to answer. It was also a question that enabled him to forge new ground and challenge long-held assumptions of the scientists who came before him. Ironically, toward the end of his career, many scientists would end up accusing Fox of being stuck in scientific assumptions that were losing relevance to the understanding of the earliest life-forms.

  AS A PROFESSOR AT Florida State University, Sidney Fox had become one of the more prominent origin-of-life scientists in the United States. He was also one of the first to be drawn into the web of NASA’s exobiology program, which was rapidly expanding along with the rest of the agency. He had been asked by NASA to organize the first American scientific conference on the origin of life, the Wakulla Springs conference, where he had brought Haldane and Oparin together. Ever since, he had aggressively tapped into NASA funding, using it to establish the first exobiology lab in the country, the Institute for Space Biosciences at Florida State. When Fox moved on to the University of Miami in 1964, NASA funding helped him establish a freestanding research facility, the Institute of Molecular Evolution, where several luminaries in origin-of-life research would be trained over the next two decades.

  Prior to the Apollo 11 landing, most NASA scientists predicted they would find a bounty of organic compounds on the moon. Cyril Ponnamperuma had been particularly confident. As it turned out, the Apollo astronauts found a desolate landscape without a protective atmosphere provided by a planet like the Earth and shaped by billions of years of exposure to the sun. Though the lunar samples from Apollo 11 were eventually found to contain small traces of amino acids, these were so scarce that it was hard to see them as significant. As Fox would later write, it was as if the surface of the moon had been “baked to a cinder.”

  Fox wasn’t terribly disappointed. Officially, his role in the space program was to look for traces of organic compounds, evidence that the precursors of life were strewn throughout the solar system. But his real interest in exobiology wasn’t so much the possibility of life in space as it was what space could tell us about life on Earth. He was looking for clues to how life might have begun on Earth, as he put it, “to test proposed concepts of steps leading to the emergence of life.” By the time of the Apollo 11 mission, Fox had already come to believe that his laboratory experiments had shown the next crucial step in the evolution from amino acids to full-fledged proteins, and that he had solved the riddle of what Haldane would have called the “half-living” stage in the evolution of a living cell might have been like.

  From the beginning of his experimental work on proteins, Fox had had his share of detractors. By the time of Apollo 11, those critics had grown numerous. Scientific understanding of the molecular composition of living cells had grown exponentially in the decade and a half since the famous Miller-Urey experiment, and those advances were undermining Fox’s conception of the earliest life-forms.

  Like almost everyone in the
field by then, Fox believed that a full-fledged living cell had not simply appeared fully formed on the primitive Earth. It had become apparent that simple components of living cells must have arisen first, which could then begin the long evolutionary process that would produce cells as we know them today. But which crucial component had it been? In many ways, this was the same problem faced by Fox and other scientists in the NASA exobiology program as they looked for microscopic life on other worlds: what was it about living cells that actually made them alive?

  IN 1944, the Austrian theoretical physicist Erwin Schrödinger wrote a book called What is Life? The question was an old one. Even the most primitive ancient peoples noticed the differences between plants and animals and the inanimate world about them. The vitalists of earlier centuries had been captivated by the question of what exactly that difference was, or at least what caused it. But few had ever sought to really quantify the problem as Schrödinger had, and his book generated a great deal of excitement in the scientific world.

  Schrödinger was a physicist, and a very successful one. His elaborations of quantum mechanics would eventually win him a Nobel Prize, and he approached the phenomenon of life as one might expect a physicist to. For him, the basic element inherent to all life was its ability to avoid the inevitable fate of all matter in the physical world: the decay into entropic chaos. A living thing does this by what Schrödinger described as “drinking order” from its environment: drawing in chemical elements and energy from the environment, and then transforming and rearranging them, via a functioning metabolism. But Schrödinger also singled out another factor in what made living things living: mutation, the replication with change that lies at the heart of the modern concept of evolution.