A Brief History of Creation (43 page)

110
In its stead was nature:
C. Darwin,
Annotated Origin
, 84.

110
“If you be right”:
C. Darwin,
Correspondence
, 7:379.

110
“There is grandeur in this view of life”:
The changes to this important paragraph in
Origin
has been traced at Darwin Online (http://darwin-online.org.uk/Variorum/1859/1859-490-c-1860.html).

112
It smacked of cowardice:
As we write this book, the Institute for Creation Research, a Christian group with a mission to undermine science that contradicts biblical scripture, maintains a website with a section on the origin of life that notes Darwin's failure to address the question in
Origin
, “even though it's the title of his book.”

113
“The doctrines of the
generatio spontanea
”:
Rupke,
Richard Owen
, 173.

113
“Is there a fact, or a shadow of a fact”:
Peretó, Bada, and Lazcano, “Charles Darwin and the Origin of Life,” 399.

113
But when it came to his choice of words:
Ibid.

113
“I have long regretted”:
Ibid.

113
It would be, he guessed:
Peretó, Bada, and Lazcano, “Charles Darwin and the Origin of Life,” 401.

114
“At the present day”:
Ibid.

Chapter 7

Two excellent sources of information on Pasteur—although from radically different perspectives—are Patrice Debré's biography (
Louis Pasteur
) and Gerald L. Geison's critical reappraisal of the scientist's work and life (
The Private Science of Louis Pasteur
). Geison's otherwise excellent account falls a little short on Pasteur's conflict with Pouchet, failing to adequately point out that, ultimately, Pasteur was right about spontaneous generation, at least in the observable cases presented by Pouchet, Bastian, and those who came before them. Bastian's story is at the center of science historian James Strick's
Sparks of Life: Darwinism and the Victorian Debates over Spontaneous Generation
, which does a good job of showing how the conflict between miasmatic theory and germ theory became wrapped up in the contentious debate over spontaneous generation.

118
Pasteur began his address:
Pasteur, “On Spontaneous Generation.”

119
“We simply take a drop of sea-water”:
Geison,
Private Science of Louis Pasteur
, 111.

119
“Mightn't matter, perhaps, organize itself?”:
Ibid.

120
In Pasteur's later years:
The importance Pasteur placed on spontaneous generation is corroborated in Debr
é'
s
Louis Pasteur
.

122
When Lamarck died penniless and nearly blind:
Cuvier, G. “Biographical Memoir of M. de Lamarck,” 1.

123
To a friend, Goethe likened the debate:
Appel,
Cuvier-Geoffroy Debate
, 1.

124
The reason for the phenomenon:
The origin of homochirality is still a topic of scientific debate. The best guess to date is that in order for large molecules like proteins or nucleic acids to function properly, homochirality is necessary.
The initial bias toward one or the other may have been inherited from the pre-solar-system outer-space environment, where circularly polarized light from neutron stars and supernovas selectively formed one or the other orientation of the molecule. Homochirality should not be confused with the distinction between organic and nonorganic molecules. Organic molecules can be homochiral, but they don't
need
to be.

125
Soon, his wife was writing her father:
Debré,
Louis Pasteur
, 87.

126
Pasteur wrote to a colleague:
Ibid., 150.

127
Darwin, who knew nothing of Royer:
Prum, “Charles Darwin's First French Translations,” 392.

128
In their judgment, they wrote:
Geison,
Private Science of Louis Pasteur
, 125.

129
One, the anatomist Thomas Huxley:
Jensen, “X Club,” 64.

130
That night, they decided to form:
Ibid.

131
It was held at Oxford:
Desmond and Moore,
Darwin
, 493.

135
In a letter to Wallace:
Peretó, Bada, and Lazcano, “Charles Darwin and the Origin of Life,” 398.

137
From the south of France:
Debré,
Louis Pasteur
, 179.

141
“We are told, indeed”:
Brieger,
Medical America
, 286.

143
“Do you know why it is so important”:
Debré,
Louis Pasteur
, 300.

143
In a vicious review of
The Beginnings of Life
:
Strick,
Sparks of Life
, 101.

144
“To our mind the position is quite unchanged”:
“Origin of Life,”
Lancet
, 970.

145
“Though no evidence worth anything”:
F. Darwin,
More Letters of Charles Darwin
, 171.

Chapter 8

JBS: The Life and Work of JBS Haldane
, by Ronald Clark, is a marvelous biography of a colorful figure whose significance has largely been forgotten. Biographical material on Alexander Oparin is harder to come by. William Schopf includes a nice firsthand portrait of the Russian scientist in
Cradle of Life
. Loren Graham's works on Soviet science (
Science in Russia and the Soviet Union
and
Science, Philosophy, and Human Behavior in the Soviet Union
) continue to stand out as the most authoritative record of that sad period in Russian history.

147
A Scottish geologist by the name of James Hutton:
Dean,
James Hutton and the History of Geology
, 262.

148
“Though speculations concerning”:
“British Association—Leicester Meeting,” 135.

149
“Those who lived in close contact with him”:
Clark,
JBS
, 45.

150
After injuring his forehead:
Ibid., 13.

151
They were exceedingly unpredictable:
Ibid., 36.

151
He later recalled that he “thought it important”:
Ibid., 37.

151
Sir Douglas Haig, commander:
Ibid.

153
Haldane's admirer Arthur C. Clarke:
Clarke, Foreword to
What I Require from Life
, ix.

153
Either an act of abiogenesis:
Haldane, “The Origin of Life,” 6.

154
On the seventy-fifth anniversary:
Hyman and Brangwynne, “In Retrospect,” 524.

156
Later, when he became a professor:
Schopf,
Cradle of Life
, 112.

156
Bakh found himself gradually elevated:
Communist dominance of Russian scientific institutions was not as quick as one might imagine. It would be a number of years until those institutions came under the kind of totalitarian control that characterized the Stalinist period. Not until 1929 did the Russian Academy of Sciences admit its first communists, a group that included Bakh and Oparin.

158
Kelvin postulated that the Earth:
A deeper elaboration of Kelvin's methods can be found in “Kelvin, Perry and the Age of the Earth,” by Philip C. England, Peter Molnar, and Frank Richter.

158
By 1897, he had settled on:
Kelvin,
Mathematical and Physical Papers
, 5:215.

161
“If the theory [evolution] be true”:
Schopf,
Cradle of Life
, 15.

163
In 1891, Walcott wrote:
Walcott, “Pre-Cambrian Rocks,” 594.

167
The son of an illiterate peasant farmer:
The
Pravda
article and much of the biographical information can be found in Zhores Medvedev's
The Rise and Fall of T. D. Lysenko
.

167
“If one is to judge a man”:
Medvedev,
Rise and Fall of T. D. Lysenko
, 11.

169
“If you had been there during those years”:
Graham,
Science in Russia and the Soviet Union
, p. 276.

169
“Sixty years in socks is enough”:
DeJong-Lambert,
Cold War Politics of Genetic Research
, 150.

170
He went on to say:
Clark,
JBS
, 294.

170
“I suppose that Oparin and I”:
Ibid., 286.

Chapter 9

Detailed biographical treatments of many of the characters in this chapter, including Harold Urey, Stanley Miller, and Sidney Fox, can be found in a series of books entitled
Men of Space
. The series was authored in the 1960s by a former Hollywood actress and personality named Shirley Thomas, billed on the book jackets as “The First Lady of Space.” James Strick's article “Creating a Cosmic Discipline,” from the
Journal of the History of Biology
, is an excellent account of the events leading to the establishment of NASA's exobiology program, as well as the program's early years.

173
“If God did not do it this way”:
Bada and Lazcano, “Stanley Miller's 70th Birthday,” 109.

174
In 1952, Teller left Chicago:
In 1946, Teller became the first scientist to conceive of an atomic bomb that used hydrogen fusion to magnify its destructive power. After the Soviet Union's successful test of an atomic bomb in 1949, President Truman had started to steer money into research for Teller's weapon—what would come to be called the hydrogen bomb. The project initially met a lot of resistance from other nuclear scientists, who questioned Teller's assumptions. By 1952, however, advances in the understanding of nuclear physics had changed many minds in the scientific community. There were also concerns in the intelligence community that the Soviets were working on their own version of such a bomb, and the Defense Department wanted to jump-start its program. Teller took charge of the secret weapon project at the University of California's Radiation Laboratory at Lawrence Livermore. Soon he was named director of the US primary nuclear weapons development facility at Los Alamos. By the end of 1952, the United States had tested its first nuclear weapon based on Teller's design. A year later, the Soviets tested their own hydrogen bomb.

175
Calvin was one of the world's greatest authorities:
Of all the metabolic functions of living organisms, photosynthesis is one of the most complex. Looking backward from a modern evolutionary vantage point, it's easy to see plants, bereft of nervous systems, as less “advanced” than animals. This was the view held by early evolutionists like Huxley, who thought the first organisms were likely some form of plantlike life akin to algae. Coming from a background in plant biology, Alexander Oparin saw it the opposite way. Fermenting microbes were the more basic organisms and must have appeared first. Plants, with their sophisticated ability to absorb energy from the sun, were more complex and must have evolved later. Oparin's view has come to be generally accepted in the scientific community.

179
An editorial in the
New York Times
:
“Life and a Glass Earth,”
New York Times
.

179
Time
magazine reported:
“Science: Semi-Creation,”
Time
.

180
Urey told Miller he had to make up his own mind:
Lazcano and Bada, “Stanley L. Miller (1930–2007),” 379.

182
After the results of the Miller-Urey experiment:
Schopf,
Cradle of Life
, 127.

182
Later in the winter of 1957:
Lederberg recounted his meeting with Haldane in Calcutta in great detail in an article he wrote for the
Journal of Genetics
entitled “Sputnik + 30.”

184
As Carl Sagan later wrote:
Strick, “Creating a Cosmic Discipline,” 135.

Chapter 10

A Man on the Moon
, by Andrew Chaikin, stands out as the finest account of the
Apollo
missions. Mathew Ridley's
Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code
is an excellent account of how the genetic machinery of living cells was elaborated. Ridley's popular book
Genome
also delves into the discoveries that paved the way for what would become a monumental advance in our understanding of biology.

188
“The surface appears to be”:
Chaikin,
Man on the Moon
, 208.

189
Aldrin called it “magnificent desolation”:
Ibid., 211.

190
An elaborate quarantine center:
Gary McCollum and Donald Bogard's interview for NASA's oral history project goes into the precautions at length.

192
“You are going to make a choice”:
“Fox,”
Mobile Register
.

193
As Fox would later write:
S. W. Fox, “Apollo Program and Amino Acids,” 46.

193
He was looking for clues:
Ibid.

197
“Fox, all the problems of life”:
Strick, “Creating a Cosmic Discipline,” 154.

197
He returned to California:
“Sidney W. Fox,”
Los Angeles Times
.

198
His experiment, he claimed:
S. W. Fox, Harada, and Kendrick, “Production of Spherules.”

200
“I have never seen Francis Crick”:
Watson,
Double Helix
, 7.

200
And although his grandfather:
Ridley, “Crick and Darwin's Shared Publication,” 244.

200
He was rescued from this fate:
R. Alexander and Stevens, “Obituary: Francis Crick.”