Posted on 01/10/2004 8:05:30 AM PST by PatrickHenry
GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- Researchers at the University of Florida say they have shown that minerals were key to some of the initial processes that formed life on Earth. Specifically, a borax-containing mineral known as colemanite helps convert organic molecules found in interstellar dust clouds into a sugar, known as ribose, central to the genetic material called RNA. This announcement provides a key step toward solving the 3-billion-year-old mystery of how life on Earth began. The findings will appear in Friday's issue of the journal Science. Steven Benner, Alonso Ricardo, Matthew Carrigan and Alison Olcott built on a famous experiment done 50 years earlier by Stanley Miller that is found in many textbooks. In 1953, Miller showed that electric sparks in a primitive atmosphere made amino acids, the building blocks of proteins.
Miller's experiment failed to identify sugars that were needed for genetic material, however. "The sugar ribose can be formed from interstellar precursors under prebiotic conditions," said Benner, who led the research funded by NASA, the National Science Foundation and The Agouron Institute in Pasadena, Calif. "But ribose is too unstable to survive under Miller's conditions." Ribose, like most sugars, turns into tar if not handled carefully. "It is like baking a cake too long," said Benner, a UF distinguished professor of chemistry and anatomy and cell biology. In 1995, Miller gave up trying to make ribose prebiotically, writing: "The first genetic material could not have contained ribose or other sugars because of their instability."
Benner, who also is a member of NASA's Astrobiology Institute, did the first experiments as an instructor at an international geobiology course last summer funded by the Agouron Institute and held at the University of Southern California Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies. "We asked two questions. First, what simple organic molecules might have been present on early Earth as starting materials to form ribose? Then, what might have been present on early Earth to capture ribose and keep it from burning up like overcooked cake?" Benner said.
To identify simple organic molecules that might be the starting materials, Benner turned to compounds known to exist in interstellar dust, such as formaldehyde, used to preserve tissue. "Formaldehyde may not seem to be a good starting point for the life that we know," he said. "But it is simple. With only one carbon atom, one oxygen atom and two hydrogen atoms, there is a lot of formaldehyde to work with in the cosmos."
Benner and his team showed that formaldehyde, with other interstellar compounds, could form ribose and other sugars when treated in the presence of base materials such as lime, a material used to adjust the pH level of lawns, among other things. Lime was effective, but the ribose decomposed soon after it was formed.
Recognizing that ribose had a particular chemical structure that allowed it to bind to minerals containing the element boron, they turned to another substance called colemanite. "Colemanite is a mineral containing borate found in Death Valley," he said. "Without it, ribose turns into a brown tar. With it, ribose and other sugars emerge as clean products." Benner then showed similar reactions with other borate minerals, including ulexite and kernite, which is more commonly known as borax.
Benner and his team are the first researchers to succeed in making significant amounts of ribose under these early conditions.
Joseph Piccirilli, a biological chemist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the University of Chicago, said Benner's work "has simplicity and brilliance."
"Organic chemists have long known that borate complexes with compounds like ribose," Piccirilli said, "and prebiotic scientists have long believed that minerals on the early Earth played an important role in the origin of life." Until now, "no one has put the two ideas together," he said.
"We are not claiming that this is how life started," Benner stressed. "We are saying that we have demonstrated a recipe to make a key part of life without any biochemical machinery. The more recipes of this type that can be found, the more clues we have about how life could have actually gotten started on the primitive Earth."
While best classified as basic science, the work has practical biological and medical value. "Curiously, thinking about how life originated and what form it might take on other planets helps us design new tools for disease diagnostics and therapy," Benner said. Diagnostic tools enabled by Benner's work seeking alternative life forms are used today in the clinic to monitor the load of the viruses that cause AIDS and hepatitis C.
The work also complements other research Benner is conducting that focuses on ancient forms of life on Earth. In a September report in Nature, Benner and his collaborators deduced the structure of a protein found in a bacterium that lived several billion years ago and resurrected the ancient protein. By studying it in the laboratory, the group inferred the ancient bacteria lived in a hot spring at about 150 degrees Fahrenheit.
With the prebiotic experiments, Benner said, "we are working forward in time, from the origin of the planet to the first life. With experiments with ancient proteins, we work backwards in time, from the modern world to the most primitive of bacteria." The group's goal, he said, is to have the two meet in the middle.
I hardly see cosmology as a subfield of philosophy. My theological views offer an explanation of cosmology. It's incomplete, doesn't answer how, but it does answer Who. And it is clear theology influences the interpretation of the evidence for cosmology.
Alas, no. Not for scientists. You have a wonderful learning experience ahead of you, my novice friend.
Ah, life is a wonderful learning experience, but I suspect you define a scientist as someone who closes their minds to many possibilities.
If a person is willing to consider the possibility that God is, he can then examine the evidence for that possibility. And if he does so, he is very likely IMHO to determine that God not only is, but He has a lot of answers to our questions.
It is written that the beginning of wisdom is the fear of God. To you that statement is as unscientific as it can be. To me, that is a theory, a hypothesis that is has been tested and proven so often that it is accepted as a universal law.
Ah. Then you have found your truth. Go in peace.
Yes, well, I hope that my love making is good enough that I don't have to get out in the world very much.
On the contrary, that's what the Young-Earth-Creationists do - rejecting all evidence, questioning the obvious, inserting impossible (non)explanations. Just like you do.
If a person is willing to consider the possibility that God is, he can then examine the evidence for that possibility. And if he does so, he is very likely IMHO to determine that God not only is, but He has a lot of answers to our questions.
Yes, Krishna answers our questions, but, since he is such a tricky god, are they the correct answers?
Your conceit about a particular god, a particular religion, or a particular sect is neither unique nor informative. At this point, it's just boring.
If it's of the same quality as your philosophy, you really need to get out more.
No they are not. Krishna is an imaginary God made up in men's minds. If you listened carefully to Krishna's answers, you would see the contradictions.
Your conceit about a particular god, a particular religion, or a particular sect is neither unique nor informative. At this point, it's just boring.
So sorry to have bored you. But is your conceit that all religions are equally invalid, an assumption, an excuse or a well thought out position? Because if you are wrong, and there is a God, you no doubt will be called upon to answer for your decision.
Well, two things come to mind...
First, my granny always said you couldn't live without 20 Mule Team Borax. I guess she was right, in more ways than she knew.
The other is, GO GATORS! :-D
If I find both satisfying, what will I gain by getting out more?
Well variety make me appreciate her love-making more? Or will it harm the relationship and one of the pillars of good love-making?
Will another God surprise me and answer my prayers too? Thus, making the One that already does out to be a God who answers prayers but was lying about there being no other Gods? I've examined the beliefs associated with other gods, to believe that none of them can't stand a candle to the One I have.
Yes, but when I see a blind man walking towards a cliff, it is my natural instinct to add my voice to the chorus of those yelling for the man to change directions. That the man has already ignored others who shout louder and clearer than I, does indeed make me think that my effort is in vain. Nevertheless, I feel compelled to try, no matter how hopeless, no matter how certain it is that I will only earn the man's contempt, be shot the finger and told to FOff.
So, please forgive my juvenile attempt, but it is easier to try and receive your condemnation than it is to remain silent and receive my own.
A Gators fan, huh? GO GATORS!! ;-)
Just as all of them are.
If you listened carefully to Krishna's answers, you would see the contradictions.
All religious doctrines have contradictions.
So what else is new?
1st Corinthians 13:11
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
If you wish to find contradictions in any religious doctrine you will find them. Same for consistency. The results of your analysis are in your head before you start.
I find no contraditions in Christianity.
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