A Brief History of Creation (44 page)

202
Joshua Lederberg would one day:
Lederberg, “Transformation of Genetics by DNA.”

202
“We have as yet no actual knowledge”:
Muller, “Development of the Gene Theory,” 95–96.

203
A blunt American with a crew cut:
Watson,
Double Helix
.

203
Later, in
The Double Helix
:
Ibid., 14.

203
“the product of an unsatisfied mother”:
Watson,
The Double Helix
, p. 17.

204
As early as 1927, the Soviet scientist Nikolai Koltsov:
“Consequences of Political Dictatorship,”
Nature Reviews. Genetics
.

204
The structure, Watson and Crick wrote:
Watson and Crick, “Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids.”

206
Though it carried genetic information:
Ridley,
Francis Crick
, 171.

Chapter 11

Kathy Sawyer's
The Rock from Mars
is a thorough telling of the story behind ALH84001, although the excitement that still surrounded the meteorite at the time her book was written has largely faded. Peter Ward's
Life as We Do Not Know It
is a good scientific take on the question of life in space.

211
She noticed that the rock:
Score's initial observations of ALH84001 can be read at http://curator.jsc.nasa.gov/antmet/samples/petdes.cfm?sample=ALH84001.

212
But the technology used:
Today, the number of meteorites identified as Martian has grown to 134, including four actually observed dropping from the sky. One that fell in Egypt in 1911 was reported to have struck and killed a farmer's unfortunate dog. Since the planets are relatively close neighbors in the solar system, it would not be surprising for Martian rocks to be common on Earth. Some scientists have estimated that half a ton of Martian rocks fall onto the Earth each year. Of all the Martian meteorites discovered to date, half have been found in the ice fields of Antarctica.

212
In any event, over the next several years:
Fry,
Emergence of Life on Earth
, 221.

212
“
But why, some say, the moon?
”:
Video and text of President Kennedy's speech at Rice University is available at http://er.jsc.nasa.gov/seh/ricetalk.htm.

216
“Today Rock 84001 speaks to us”:
The full text of Clinton's statement is available at http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/snc/clinton.html.

216
“We must regard it as probable”:
Kelvin, “Presidential Address,” 202.

217
The clamor of interest:
In 1965, a different sample of Orgueil was found to have been tampered with. In 1864, someone had inserted plant fragments into the rock and then used coal and glue to try to make it appear that the plant was embedded in the meteorite. Rather than a hoax to create the impression of extraterrestrial life, historians believe the tampering was an attempt to undercut Pasteur's work on disproving spontaneous generation.

217
In 1962, they reported their findings:
Nagy, Claus, and Hennessy, “Organic Particles Embedded in Minerals.”

218
Urey, ever the open-minded skeptic:
The controversy about Orgueil has never really gone away. Since 2000, former NASA engineer Richard Hoover has published a number of papers claiming microscope-image evidence of
life in the form of tiny bacterium-like structures in the Orgueil and other carbonaceous meteorites. The last of these articles was published in 2011 in the
Journal of Cosmology
. The claims have been met with a variety of criticisms by the scientific community and produced some blowback for NASA. The agency had not endorsed Hoover's work, though it was widely reported to have done so. James Randi, the popular debunker of all things paranormal and pseudo-scientific, subsequently awarded Hoover and the
Journal of Cosmology
his not-so-coveted “Pigasus Award” in the category of “Scientist” (Plait, “2011 JREF Pigasus Awards”).

218
“The study of carbonaceous meteorites”:
Nagy and Lynch, “Life-like Forms in Meteorites,” 606.

219
He had his doubts about specific claims:
Gould, Stephen, “Life on Mars? So What?”
New York Times
, August 11, 1996.

221
After two years of review:
Kerr, R. “Requiem for Life on Mars?”

Chapter 12

The New Foundations of Evolution
, by Jan Sapp, is a detailed history of the modern study of microbial evolution, and contains a thorough account of Carl Woese's discovery of the archaea.

229
“By deducing rather ancient ancestor sequences”:
Letter from Carl Woese to Francis Crick, June 24, 1969, copy provided by George Fox.

232
“The archaea are related to us”:
Bult et al., “Complete Genome Sequence.”

233
Reflecting on his dramatic vindication:
Morell, “Microbiology's Scarred Revolutionary.” Ernst Mayr remained one of the few prominent holdouts to the new tree of life, even though he and Woese had come to change places in the opinions of most scientists. Unable to bring himself to accept the finding he had so stringently opposed, Mayr died in 2005 still insisting that Woese was wrong.

235
By swapping information freely:
We now know that viruses may also play an important role in fostering evolutionary change. Traditionally, viruses have been seen as nothing more than opportunists looking for a free lunch in the form of a host in which to replicate. But when viruses move to a new host, they may bring pieces of DNA from their last host with them. Provided the host survives the infection, this DNA may become part of the host's new genetic complement and be passed on by binary fission to its progeny. Thus, viruses may play an important role in accelerating the spread of genetic diversity.

236
Woese called horizontal gene transfer:
Woese, “Evolving Biological Organization,” 106.

237
An organic chemist before:
Wächtershäuser's brother-in law, interestingly, is George Fox, Woese's collaborator on the discovery of archaea. Fox introduced Wächtershäuser to Woese.

Chapter 13

Biographical details on Jack Szostak are drawn mostly from the autobiographical sketch he wrote for the Nobel Committee and from an interview conducted at his lab in Boston.

242
“The first stage of evolution proceeds”:
Gilbert, “RNA World.”

245
And though, like Henry Bastian and Francis Crick:
Szostak told us in an interview that if he were a young student today, with the advances in technology enabling closer study of the way the brain actually works, he would devote himself to studying the phenomenon of consciousness. He predicted that science in the twenty-first century would be dominated by the unraveling of this question.

246
Venter and his team encoded:
Angier, “Peering over the Fortress.”

248
This made perfect sense:
Spiegelman's results raise the interesting question of why not all genomes eventually shrink down to the smallest size possible. The conditions in Spiegelman's experiments were very favorable for the survival of shorter and shorter sequences. In the real world, viral genome have to keep the information for making the polymerase and the other various proteins that enable it to infect its host; thus there is a constant tension between being able to make copies faster and at the same time keeping all of the information that is necessary to propagate both. There is therefore a size limit below which the virus would become nonfunctional and noninfectious, and thus go extinct.

Epilogue

253
In his famous lecture at the Sorbonne:
Pasteur, “On Spontaneous Generation.”

253
Roughly a century and a half later:
Dawkins's monologue prior to his interview of Craig Venter can be seen on YouTube, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3E25jgPgmzk.

254
“Score one for Francis”:
Ridley,
Francis Crick
, 208.

254
In 1996, Pope John Paul II alluded to:
John Paul II, “Truth Cannot Contradict Truth.”

257
“It is no easy matter to deal with”:
Wald, “Origin of Life,” 45–46.

Appendix

259
Johannes van Helmont's Recipe for Mice:
Cobb,
Generation
, 10.

259
Henry Bastian's Recipes for Microbes:
Bastian,
Evolution and the Origin of Life
.

260
Sidney Fox's Recipe for Proteinoid Microspheres:
S. W. Fox and Harada, “Thermal Copolymerization.”

260
Craig Venter's Recipe for a Cell:
Gibson et al., “Creation of a Bacterial Cell.”

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