Transcription
[Music] Have things been hyped up? Is there a lot of hyperbole by the researchers themselves in the field of origin of life? The reasons for this lecture on abiogenesis, uh, just so that everybody can catch up, just in case somebody's joining us new. Let me just touch on this. Dave Farina posted a video entitled "Elucidating the Agenda of James Tour: A Defense of Abiogenesis." See the description box below for the link. After watching that video, I was confused about almost every slide and statement that Dave Farina presented. There were numerous gross scientific inaccuracies in his claims, in my opinion. Since others might be likewise confused, I will use the Farina video with time stamps as the launch point for this series of lectures. So you'll see a little time stamp in there, and you can go back to his video and verify that that that's that's where I got that quote from, or that's where I pull that that uh that that video capture from. I'm thankful to Dave Farina. If thankful that Dave Farina attempts to teach the layperson about scientific topics on his YouTube channel, "Professor Dave Explains," that's a commendable endeavor. I therefore seek no contest with Dave Farina, only clarity. I'm not here to pick a fight, not at all. I don't want I don't want to have any fight with Dave. I just want to try to bring clarity to some of the things that were said on his video. Other synthetic chemists can comment and point out where I'm correct or incorrect. I particularly invite a critique from my synthetic chemist colleagues and students studying synthetic chemistry, and those studying origin of life. If disputing, please reference a literature article so that I can read and learn. So I want to read and learn. So if you're you're disputing something I've said, just send me the article, send me a reference to the article, the DOI or something so I can access it, take a look at it myself.
All right, hype and origin of life claims. And this misunderstanding has come because of the projections of those who work in the area of origin of life. They do one little thing, and then they extrapolate it, and then they work with the press to ramp it up even more, and they project as if they really know it. And so the layperson reads this and says, "Ah, you see, scientists understand." So at 13 minutes and 12 seconds, some people say, "Quote, but I don't think it's fair to put the blame on scientists. The blame belongs to the press." And again, some say, "The blame is with the media outlets, not with the scientists." Well, I think the blame is not just with the media outlets. The blame is also with the scientists who work in the area of origin of life, and that's what I hope to show you. Conversely, I think there's plenty of blame on the origin of life researchers themselves: A) their own claims regarding their own claims, and B) failing to reign in the press.
Now, uh, this has resulted in much misinformation, even into the highest levels of the academy. When I say academy, even into the universities. There are lots of professors who misunderstand where we are in origin of life, what has been done, and what hasn't been done. And and at the highest levels. And this happens because of this misinformation that is put out. Now, I know it is hard sometimes to reign in the press, sometimes because of their strictures, they do not let you see the things that they have have uh written. And I know that. But there are other times where they give you the draft, or you can request the draft, and you can correct things once they get get out of control. But I'm talking today mainly about the hype that's in the research articles themselves, because many professors are highly confused on these topics. These are smart people. Even biology professors sometimes have have trouble distinguishing between evolution and origin of life. I mean, I've seen it, and and I've seen that myself. So anyway, people are really confused.
So let's start looking into this again. Here's the the best, let me get get this laser pointer here. The best uh journal within the realms of science is this journal Nature. In their Innovations section, which is a section that is written, usually it's written by an expert, but to explain a scientific concept, not to the layperson, but to people who read Nature, people who are are scientifically are scientists themselves, but they may not work specifically in that area. An article was written: "How Did Life Begin? Untangling the Origin of Organisms Will Require Experiments at the Tiniest Scales and Observations at the Vastest." Now, this was written by Jack Szostak. Who is Jack Szostak? First of all, I just want to give a shout out for Jack. He is a nice man. He is a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School. So you know, we're talking about the best folks. And one of the recipients of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine. So this was written by a Nobel Prize winner. This is a top guy. He's a biologist, a professor of genetics, and this was published in May 2018. This is what's being put out there to teach scientifically literate people about how did life begin. This is what has been written: "How Did Life Begin?" by Nobel Laureate Jack Szostak, Nature, 2018. He writes, "The early atmosphere had no oxygen. It consisted mainly of nitrogen and carbon dioxide, with smaller amounts of hydrogen, water, and methane." Remember, in one of the former videos, we read an article where they're suggesting the the Earth had plenty of oxygen. So there's some confusion on that point. He went on, "Lightning, asteroid impacts, and ultraviolet light from the sun acted on the atmosphere to generate hydrogen cyanide, a compound of hydrogen, carbon, and nitrogen, raining into volcanic or crater lakes. The cyanide reacted with iron brought up by water circulating through the rocks. The resulting iron cyanide compounds accumulated over time, building up into a concentrated stew of reactive chemicals."
"Life as we know it requires RNA. Some scientists believe that RNA emerged directly from these reactive chemicals, nudged along by dynamic forces in the environment." That is utterly ridiculous. I don't I don't know what scientists believe, but I don't I don't. There is no scientific evidence, nothing, nothing, nothing where you can take iron cyanide and some lightning and and and form form uh and iron and form RNA. I don't know scientists that believe that, but certainly there's no science that that ever suggests that. And we don't even use these terms in synthetic chemistry. "Nudged along by dynamic forces in the environment." That that's utterly ridiculous. "Nucleotides, the building blocks of RNA, eventually formed, then joined together to make strands of RNA. Some stages in this process are still not well understood." You can underscore that. Nucleotides have never been formed. Never been shown to form that way. Nucleotides are really hard. Remember, you got to have a pentose sugar. We'll go through the the prebiotic formation of sugars. Nobody knows how those form. Then you have to have the the base. That's a little bit easier to think of how that might have formed. Sugar is a killer. And then to have them hook up. How do they hook up? They don't just spontaneously hook up. And how do they stay together? How do they stay together? I mean, isn't RNA pretty unstable? And strands of RNA? Yeah, you can get strands of RNA, but there has to be codons in it. There has to be information, code encoded in it. If you have a random box of letters and you start sticking those letters together in random order, there's no information transferred. You have to have them spelling out words. You have to have what are called codons, which we'll learn about. We'll cover codons. Just hooking together doesn't make any intelligible RNA. It is ribonucleic acid, I'll give you that, but there's no information stored in it. The information is a mystery.
"Once RNA was made, so now all of a sudden we've got RNA. Some strands of it became enclosed within tiny vesicles formed by the spontaneous assembly of fatty acid lipids in the membranes." Where did the fatty acids form? How did those spontaneously form? Boy, I'd love to see that chemistry from methane. And then and then they formed membranes, creating the first protocells. "As the membranes incorporated more fatty acids, they grew and divided. At the same time, internal chemical reactions drove replication of the encapsulated RNA." That's really fanciful. It really is. I mean, so how did life begin? So here's what he writes in his article in Nature, 2018: "Quote, today, the question of how chemistry on the infant Earth gave rise to RNA and RNA-based cells is the central quest in in in origin of life research. Some scientists think that life originally used simpler molecules and only later evolved RNA. Other researchers, however, are tackling the origin of RNA head on, and exciting new ideas are revolutionizing the once quiet backwater of chemical research. Favored geochemical scenarios involved volcanic regions or crater or impact craters with complex organic chemistry, multiple sources of energy, dynamic light-dark, hot-cold, wet-dry cycles. Strikingly, many of the chemical intermediates on the way to RNA crystallize out of reaction mixtures, self-purifying and potentially accumulating on the early Earth as organic minerals, reservoirs of materials waiting to come to life when conditions change. Assuming the key problem is solved, how did we assume that? We still need to understand how RNA was replicated within the first primitive cells. Researchers are just beginning to identify the sources of chemical energy that could enable the RNA to copy itself, but much remains to be done. If these hurdles can be overcome, we may be able to build replicating, evolving RNA-based cells in the laboratory, recapitulating a possible route to the origin of life."
There is so much speculation in here. I mean, I won't even require you to do this on an earlier try. Doing this in a laboratory, and if this thing were possible on an early Earth, why can't anybody get close to this? Not even close. Not even close. Not even make the building blocks to the building blocks to get close to this. We're going to see this in this series of videos, but that's a lot of hype. That's a lot of hype.
Then he shows Jack Szostak in his in his article. He shows this picture as well. Now, Jack is a nice man, and he is a tremendous biologist, but he is his he is uh believed into this this uh this hype that was put forth by his synthetic chemist colleagues because he puts out this this picture. And I've talked to him about this, and he said that this was transcribed from an earlier article by an artist. So he put shouldn't put much stock in it. But let me show you what was shown. He says that these are simple sugars. If you look at his coding here, remember there are some conventions in writing molecules. If you the only thing that you don't have to include the hydrogen atoms on are carbons, and that's when the carbons have a bend in a stick configuration. But even if we say that, then if you're if you're not going to include the hydrogens, you at least have to show the double bonds, of which he doesn't show any. So he's got one, two, three propane trial here. He says that this is a simple sugar. It is not. This is ethylene glycol. It is not a simple sugar. But even if you did have an aldehyde here, it still would not be a simple sugar. These are cyanide derivatives. Cyanide derivatives. Iron cyanide derivatives are really robust compounds, and and there's very little free cyanide in solution that mixed with phosphate, and you got an RNA nucleotide. And how did that happen? UV light from above and heat below. UV light drove the conversion of cyanides into simple sugars. Nobody knows how that happens. We have no evidence for that. Phosphate catalyzed chemical reactions between sugars and cyanide derivatives. I don't know of evidence for that. Maybe there is. It'd be great to have a reference on that. In the presence of UV light and phosphate, RNA nucleotides were formed. That does not happen. Just does not happen. You can't mix these chemicals under any conditions and get this that anyone knows about. This is called RNA. It's not really RNA because for RNA, you have to have R being ribose. Ribose. That means that you have to have the stereochemistry of ribose. There's no stereochemistry shown on that molecule. None whatsoever. So that can't be ribose. That is that you want to call that a pentose sugar, fine, but that's not ribose. For ribose, you have to have steric chemistry. And then then you have your your your your base here. All right. So there's a lot of things wrong with this, but people believe Jack Szostak, and this gets people confused.
Now, if you say, "Well, how did this?" He's thinking of the work by Sutherland. So Sutherland, you want to see that molecule that he's showing in that that other structure? So that's here. All right. That's what he's trying to show is a molecule like this. Well, how did this happen? This just might take. Did you just take some cyanide and some simple sugars and get this? No. Did he take ethylene glycol and one, two, three propane trial and get this? No. Look at all the steps involved. So this entire shaded region, this this shaded region here, you had to go from these small molecules all the way along all of these steps involved. You get you got a dozen steps, and some of this came in from other steps down here, came into this shaded region from other steps over here, come into this. And all of these steps involved. It's not homochiral. It is racemic. So without homochirality, we don't know where the homochirality came from. It is racemic. He has relative stereochemical control. Um, uh, but but this this is what he's got here. How does this form from what Szostak puts forth? So here's the article that he's referring to, but it's much more complex than he projects. Try to do all of this in a prebiotic scenario is not easy. We'll look at some of Sutherland's work. Sutherland's a great organic chemist. Jack Szostak, being a biologist, seems to have misunderstood it and thereby oversimplified what was going on here. It's not just taking, as he had shown, a couple of small molecules with heat and light, and poof, you get this. That's how chemistry works. There's a lot of steps in here, a lot of steps involved. And I'll show you the some of the other hidden secrets as to what what they do to make this this look like it could work.
So just take one of the steps of Szostak's steps it involved in here. So you got to make one, two, three propane trial, which was this molecule that uh that Szostak was referencing. And he uses it from this dihydroxyacetone. All right. So think about doing this on a prebiotic Earth. Dihydroxyacetone, eight milligrams, and this sodium hydrogen phosphate, milligrams, were dissolved in water. D2O. D2O because we're going to be doing NMR. So dissolved in water, and the resultant solution was degassed for 15 minutes. How are you going to degas on an early Earth? To do degassing, you need a vacuum pump. No vacuum pumps on early Earth. There was an atmosphere. How are you going to just just make the atmosphere go away? This is supposed to be a prebiotically relevant synthesis. Then sodium hydrogen sulfide, 60 milligrams, was added, and the solution turned yellow. When the sodium hydrogen sulfide was completely dissolved, the pH was adjusted to seven using degassed sodium hydroxide, HCl. Oh, there's another degassing step. And how convenient to adjust the pH. All of a sudden, at that point, you would have had to have a really smart early Earth having all these reagents ready, just ready. The solution was then transferred to a quartz tube containing copper cyanide and immediately sealed, whereupon a black precipitate formed. Immediately sealed. So immediately goes into a vessel, a quartz tube, and then is immediately sealed with a flame. You seal that thing off. So you need a torch to seal that thing off, or maybe it was a screw Teflon seal. Immediately sealed. And and uh, this is hard, hard to do. This is really hard to do even in a lab. How do you do this on an early Earth? This is supposed to be a prebiotically relevant synthesis, not a modern synthesis. The tube was placed in a Rayonet reactor. That is a box that has UV lights all inside it, and you stick your sample all surrounded by UV light, and then irradiated for six hours. Where are you going to get that intensity of UV light? Okay, let's say UV light was abundant on early Earth. If that's the case, then the reactions, the chemicals you make, are decomposing a thousand times faster when you have UV light like that. After this time, an aliquot was removed and examined by proton NMR, after which time a known amount of calcium formate to serve as an internal standard was added, and they took this spectrum. And and uh, so when they take the spectrum, this is what they want to make. This is an authentic sample that they buy. This is what it looks like in NMR. This is what they got. Look at all these other compounds. Look at how dirty that reaction mixture is. So of the desired compound, uh, glycerol was obtained in 34% yield. So they got glycerol. That's the one, two, three propane trial, another name for that is glycerol or glycerin. And so that compound was in 34% yield. So you got a bunch of other compounds. And so then they could pump on it. If you put a vacuum pump, a lot of these volatile compounds will come off. You're still left with these, but you're going to lose some of your propane trial as well. But if you adjust the pressure on your vacuum pump, you can do that. You couldn't do that on an early Earth because there are no vacuum pumps. Then did they take this mixture and bring it on to the next step? No, they didn't. No, you buy an authentic version of glycerol and you carry that on. That's not how normal synthesis is done in a laboratory. What you make has to be carried on. You can't just buy the stuff new. If you do, it's called a relay synthesis, and it exposes that that you have a problem with your mass transfer. Well, that's the thing that these origin of life researchers do over and over again. We'll get more into that.
All right, then if you look at the exquisite exactness in his synthetic protocols. So he wrote this paper in Nature Chemistry, which is probably the best chemistry journal out there. Nature is the best scientific journal. This is the best chemistry journal out there. And here's what he wrote when he was writing about this. So when you read the procedures, the precise protocols by Sutherland's suggested prebiotic-like precursors, one captures the high-level sophistication, expert synthetic prowess, and remarkable ingenuity of the researchers. Some reactions were conveniently run at room temperature, some at 60 degrees, some at 100 degrees, then washed with ice-cold water. Often the molecules were prepared by these prebiotic roots were not used, but they had to be made more cleanly and in larger scale using purely synthetic methods and organic solvents such as Lawson's reagent and tetrahydrofuran, to quote, "simply to simplify the handling procedures." Just in time and precise order of addition protocols were used over and over again. One sees precise pH adjustments through through the synthesis using of ion exchange resins and separations from the reaction mixtures, because the proceeding without separations would have destroyed the carefully prepared products. The prepare, here's an example. The preparation of cyanoacetylene on uh on copper one was suggested as a way to conveniently prepare and store it for use when needed. Copper chloride was mixed with potassium chloride to generate the Newland catalyst at 70 degrees. Then a separately generated source of acetylene gas was prepared from calcium carbide and water. So you just happen to be dripping calcium, you found some calcium carbide and water drips on it. This all happening under a rock or in a cave somewhere. And then that gas bubbles through this newly prepared Newland catalyst to prepare acrylonitrile, which is an unstable molecule that needs proper isolation and storage to inhibit its polymerization really, really rapidly, which was then treated with potassium cyanide for one hour, then five equivalents of ammonia in a 13 molar ammonia ammonium solution, adjusted to pH 9, how convenient, with sodium hydroxide to generate the desired amino propionitrile. All of the reactions were executed in separate clean vessels and properly isolated prior to proceeding to the next reaction. This is just a sampling of the preparations that are difficult for even the most skilled synthetic chemist to prepare very simple precursors to a few of the many molecules within the building block class. And the precursors were racemic. If they bore any possible stereo isomerism. This is just the very basic part of the top left of that synthesis. This is just one of the steps. You had to have this over and over again in all these steps to make this nucleotide.
Even higher level extrapolations were written about in the same article that, "Quote, all cellular substance subsystems could have arisen simultaneously through common chemistry." Has raised the level of suppositions from mere molecule types to now complex subcellular subsystems where molecules are working in concert toward a common functional goal. This is what was written: that all the cellular substances subsystems could have arisen simultaneously through common chemistry. That's not what he showed. That is pure and other uh speculation. I work in nanosystems where you try to put molecules together to work in concert together. It is so hard. He says, "All the subsystems of the cell could have risen simultaneously through common chemistry." What's he talking about? What common chemistry? Like a gazillion different reactions he uses, and and vacuum pumps, and Rayonet reactors, and all the subsystems of a cell. That's the hype I'm talking about. That shouldn't be there. That's the hype coming from the researchers themselves. And this guy is a great chemist. Sutherland is a great chemist, but it's this hype that hurts the field, that brings these primordial soup misconceptions.
[Music] How close have researchers come to an artificial cell? Well, in November 2018, not too long ago, biologists, it says this is written in Science, the best journal for all of scientific reports in the United States. Science, the second best in the world, maybe second only to Nature. They wrote an article. An article was written: "Biologists Create Create the Most Lifelike Artificial Cells." Oh, I want to see that. They've created the most. Let's see how lifelike these cells can be. And they're citing from this article, which came out Nature Communications, another great journal, called "Communication Quorum Sensing in a Non-Living Mimics of Eukaryotic Cells" by Neil DeGrave. And so let's see what they did here. So "semi-porous microcapsules made of plastic from acrylate polymerization." So these are microcapsules. You go into a fabrication facility, and you make these semi-porous plastic beads containing clay. We're prepared using modern microfluidic techniques that are done with fabrication, fabrication devices. These are machines that fabricate things. Clay has a high affinity for binding DNA. So when because clay has positive charges, so when DNA, which has negative charges, was then added to the solution, it diffuses through the semi-porous plastic microcapsules and it sticks to the clay. Where did he get the DNA? He bought it. Where where did the manufacturer get the DNA? They isolated it from natural compounds. And so that binds to the clay. "The requisite ribosomes, mRNA, enzymes, and reagents were similarly purchased or extracted from living systems, added to the medium, and permitted to diffuse into the plastic capsule." So you buy all the components of of uh of a cell. The ex, so but that's what they did. They certainly didn't make this from the bottom up. "The expected chemical reactions ensued, resulting in protein synthesis." "This new the newly formed proteins could diffuse out of the plastic microcapsules to other nearby semi-porous plastic microcapsules." "The diffusion between the nearby plastic microcapsules was termed quorum sensing." Quorum sensing. That's a really sophisticated term. This is just natural diffusion. The chemistry of the exogenously added reagents will work regardless of the container, whether it be in a plastic semi-porous microcapsule, in a test tube, or in a large-scale industrial product production tank. And one can buy a kit to do the same thing. It is far from the press-hyped claim of gene expression and communication rivaling that of living cells. There is no rivalry here. One might arguably agree that these are indeed the most lifelike artificial cells yet, but that only serves to underscore the point: nobody has ever come close to generating the workings of life. You can buy kits that have all of these reagents, you mix them together, and proteins will start getting synthesized. That's what these pieces do. They make proteins. This is this is doing biological events. It's not alive. It's just doing biological chemistry because you buy all the pieces. The pieces people didn't synthesize those pieces. They just took it from cells and they put it all in a kit. You can buy that. This is done in industry all the time to make proteins. This is done in the laboratories all the time. What he did is he put this in a porous microcapsule, and this is what's claimed as the most lifelike cells yet. Yeah, maybe this is it, meaning that there's no life here. There's no life in those cells. It's just a chemical reaction. There's just a chemical reaction in that cell. That's it. And then it diffuses out. That's all that's been done. That's hype. That's what I'm talking about.
Here's some more hype. "Redox and pH gradients drive amino acid synthesis in iron oxyhydroxide mineral systems." And so this is this is coming out uh um uh so this this is work that's um been done by by some folks at different institutions. One of them being NASA. So here's a recent example of such a scenario of simple chemistry and the hyperbole that follows. In 2019, Laura Barge and co-workers at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the California Institute of Technology, and Oak Crest Institute of Science, has similarly have simulated an undersea hydrothermal vent, heating an aqueous solution of pyruvate to 70 degrees and introducing ammonia and iron hydroxides while limiting oxygen. They observed simple reduction in reductive amination to stereo scrambled lactate and alanine respectively. So they took pyruvate, which they probably bought. I'm sure they bought it. I'm sure they didn't they they didn't make this from formaldehyde. So they by pyruvate, they take it and they react it with ammonia, and they get a reductive amination, and and so now you get racemic alanine. And then you just do a direct reduction of a carbonyl, and you get lactate. All right. Those are such simple reduction reactions that the chemistry is certain and therefore wholly unremarkable. Yet the authors write, "Quote, this shows that aqueous partially reducing iron mineral systems, which would have been common in earlier sea floor seafloor vent environments, could have facilitated synthesis and concentration of prebiotic organic molecules relevant for the emergence of life. It also suggests that geochemical gradients in the vents vent environments can drive product selectivity for prebiotic chemistry, perhaps leading to more complex organic reactions reaction systems as these molecules continue to diffuse and react under different conditions within the gradients." Come on. This is this is like one 100th the amazement of the the Miller-Urey experiment in 1952. So so 60 years later, 65 years later, they go ahead and and do this reaction, and and this is somehow remarkable, and they start saying that they talk about emergence of life. This is what I'm talking about. The NASA press office then had a field day with the results, titling their article, "NASA's Study Reproduces Origin of Life on Ocean Floor." Further writing, "Quote, scientists have reproduced in the lab how the ingredients for life could have formed deep in the ocean four billion years ago. The results of this study offer clues how life started on Earth and where else in the cosmos we might find it." That is a lie. That's just it's so wrong. It's terribly wrong. They offered no clues on the origin of life. In addition, this led to a blitzkrieg by the press that cut and pasted from the NASA press release. But the chemistry is less complex and less interesting than the 1952 Miller-Urey experiment, yet it was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a superb scientific journal. This underscores the journals themselves are complicit in continuing this sort of nonsensical experiment to be suggestive of life's origin. Unlike the far more sophisticated synthetic chemistry of the origin of life researchers like Sutherland, the work by NASA is nonsensically simple. So in that in that sense, much like the prebiotic Earth would have been. Aside from the artless 2019 NASA experiment, most origin of life researchers today put far more precision into their protocols to make more elaborate arrays of stairs scrambled intermediates. One could easily argue therefore that researchers are moving further from the heart of abiogenesis, since they are filling the protocols with the best of their intellectual training to coax molecules into the form that research the researcher desires. Yet even with all the intellectual input, the origin of life researchers overcome few, if any, of the barriers noted above.
All right, let's look at another one. "Self-A Statistical Physics of Self-Replication." So this was in the Journal of Chemical Physics by Jeremy England. He was at the at MIT at the time in the Department of Physics. "Self-replication is a capacity common to every species of living things, and the simple physical intuition dictates that such a process must invariably be fueled by the production of entropy." Here he goes on, and he undertakes some studies, and he ends up talking about the implications of this finding for bacterial cell division, as well as for prebiotic emergence of sep self-replicating nucleic acids. So here's the article that he wrote, and this was then picked up by the press. And here's what the press wrote. This is quoting Jeremy England. This is what he himself said in the press release uh on that came out in Quanta Magazine, and it was entitled "New Physics Theory of Life." Here's what Jeremy England himself said: "You start with a random clump of atoms, and if you shine light on it for long enough, it should not be so surprising that you get a plant." England said, "Well, let me tell you, shining light on atoms has been done a lot, a lot. All sorts of wavelengths of light, all sorts of electromagnetic radiation. A plant has never come out of just a pile of atoms. Never been done." This is the thing that confuses people. This is like the primordial soup nonsense that a plant comes out from a pile of atoms and light. This is the researcher himself saying this. This is the hype that I'm talking about that gives people this primordial soup model in their mind.
About another one. This is in Scientific Reports. This is a part of the Nature series of journals, a very high-ranking journal. "Emergent Properties of Giant Vesicles Formed by a Polymerization-Induced Self-Assembly Reaction." Here's one of many recent examples published in 2017 of standard chemistry being portrayed as having something to do with the constructing of a living cell. I should point out that these folks are part of the, we'll see a team here. It is a team from the Origin of Life Initiative. That's what it is. A team from the Origin of Life Initiative at Harvard University. So they're under the gun to really make some advances here. Performed a known type of polymerization reaction, water called Reversible Addition Fragmentation Chain Transfer (RAFT). This reaction type is not seen in nature. It is purely a synthetic process. The monomers that were chosen are all synthetic and unnatural. This is a standard chemistry used to make polymers, wherein there is control radical polymerization reactions that can afford a polymer chain bearing a hydrophobic block attached to a hydrophilic block. When two different monomer types are used sequentially, the researchers observed these to form polymeric vesicles during the polymerization, which is interesting, but surely not extraordinary. While they kept the radical chain growing through ultraviolet light activation, a typical activating source, the vesicles grew, consuming monomer within the vesicles to the point where the vesicles would burst. Again, nothing surprising. A critical vesicle size is reached, and then the forces between the growing vesicle and the surrounding water dictate a critical growth volume before the vesicle ruptures. The vesicle moves toward ultraviolet light, likely by heating gradients induced by the light source or reaction thermodynamics. Chemists like myself find this type of polymerization reaction to be interesting. It's a fine job for the researchers and well worth publishing. The claims should have ended there. Here's what's actually written in the research article. This is a cut and paste from the article: "The observed net oscillatory oscillatory vesicle population grows in a manner that reminds one of elementary modes of sustainable while there is food population growth seen among living systems." The data supports an interpretation in terms of micron-scale self-assembled molecular systems capable of embodying and mimicking some aspects of simple extant life, including self-assembly from a homogeneous but active chemical medium, membrane formation, metabolism, a primitive form of self-replication, and hints of elementary system selection due to spontaneous light-triggered Marangoni instability, which is surface surface tension gradients. That is hype out the wazoo. It is is just extreme, just extreme. Was that concluding statement justified? See, he says here, "it reminds one of." Just because a reminds me of b, it does not make a an embodying form of b. It's just my imagination. If the disc-shaped vesicle reminds one of a flying saucer, is it a simple extant flying saucer? No. No extant life, not even simple extant life, was demonstrated. There was such hype.
[Music] So this is what was then written in the Harvard Gazette. The Harvard Gazette, which the the local the the university papers talk a lot with the the researchers before they let this thing out, in my experience, I've been doing this for years. And they wrote an article called "Mimicking Life in a Chemical Soup." From those excessive extrapolations by the authors, the the claims were then rephrased and projected to the lay public by the Harvard Gazette and other news outlets. Quote, "A Harvard researcher seeking a model for the earliest cells has created a system that self-assembles from a chemical soup," another word, soup, primordial soup, "from a chemical soup into cell-like structures that grow, move in response to light, replicate, and exhibit signs of rudimentary evolutionary selection." Is that a fair representation of the article? Surely not. And here's here's the references on those, some of some of from the Harvard Gazette, and then lots of other journals that that copied this. This. So anyway.
[Music] Uh, here are three researchers, Van Krunkendonk, Joe Kik, and Diemer. They published in Life Springs. And then uh uh published an article called "Life Springs" that came out in Scientific American that was talking about some of the work that they had had done early and and uh some of the work that they had done. Let's see what they did. "Lipid bilayer assembly experiments were conducted by teams from University of California, Santa Cruz, the University of New South Wales in Australia, and they disclosed a summary of the work in 2017." These teams combine nucleotides and lipids in water to form lamellae with nucleotide sandwiches between the layers. Recall that nucleotides are trimers of nuclear base, carbohydrate, phosphate, and in this case, they were purchased in pure homochiral form. So already in a well-developed state. The lipids were also purchased in pure homochiral form. They showed that a condensation polymerization of the nucleotides via the pre-loaded phosphate with the purchased stereo-defined alcohol Morty on a neighboring nucleotide can take place within the lamellae upon dehydration. They further demonstrate that similar reactions can occur at the edges of hydrothermal fields associated with volcanic land masses to provide the heat needed for the vault for the reactions. The chemistry is indifferent to the heat source, whether a volcano, a Bunsen burner, a laboratory heating mantle, a heating oven. The nucleotide will polymerize upon reaching a critical concentration and temperature. The chemistry is unremarkable since it is preloaded through the purchase derivatives. They bought the stuff. The reaction. This work addresses the essential concentration needs by removing the water and driving the intermolecular reactions to form oligomers that resemble the nuclear nucleic acids. The problem with a condensation step growth polymerization is that any alcohol can be compete for the reactive electrophilic site. But in the researchers' case, they conveniently added only nucleotides and no other alcohols. The system is stacked to work through its purity. Condensation polymerization reactions need to be very pure, free of competing nucleophilic and electrophilic components, as explained by Carruthers' equation defining degrees of polymerization based upon monomer purity. If there happens to be amino acids or carbohydrates with or carbohydrates with the nucleotides, so other carbohydrates, these would terminate or interrupt the growth of the nucleotides. Moreover, the researchers did not confirm the detailed integrity of the claims structures, which if chiral analysis would have shown attacks from unintended hydroxyl sites. You look back at their data, I didn't see a good NMR showing anything any structured determination to to show the the integrity of that. Nonetheless, even with short nucleotides formed, they are not usable, not a usable form of RNA, since there's no useful sequences, there's no codon. It would be like a book of random letters, or in this case, a small book of all the same letters. The authors suggested that the lamellae sandwiching nucleotides eventually break off to form lipid bilayer vesicles containing nucleotide within vesicle constructs, which they call protocells. The conversion of planar lamellae into multi-lamellar vesicles, onion-like structures, as they dehydrate, is well established, but these generally need shearing, extrusion type mechanical forces, sonication, or peptides in order to form the requisite lipid bilayers. So the researchers' yields of the desired vesicles were surely to have been very low. The conditions used are hard to fathom being found in a prebiotic Earth: homochiral nucleotides in high chemical purity trapped in a lamella composed of homochiral stereo and regiochemically pure lipids. Even accepting that improbability, those obtained vesicle structures have almost no resemblance to cellular lipids, that have a vastly more complex constituency. The authors are merely forming lipid bilayer balls made from purchased homochiral lipids containing some randomly sequenced nucleotides from purchased homochiral nucleotides. While exciting chemistry, the origin of life researcher, nothing here is chemically remarkable, and it has almost no resemblance to a real cell. Nonetheless, behold the claims written in the published paper: "Quote, then in the gel phase, protocells pack together in a system called the progenite and exchange sets of polymers, selecting those that enable survival during many cycles." But chemicals know nothing of survival, since they are indifferent to survival. There is no mechanism shown for how their protocells would bear different sets of polymers, or exchange their sets of polymers between them, or make a selection process. The research is misappropriate terms from biology and use them in prebiotic world in a manner that makes no chemical sense, none. Furthermore, "the best adapted protocells," they're writing this, "the best adapted protocells spread to other pools or streams, moved by wind or water, and some developed the ability to use carbon dioxide for photosynthesis." There is no suggestion regarding the meaning of best adapted. It is again a misuse of terminology. Photosynthesis is a highly precise process requiring many enzymes, well-ordered electron funnels, and precisely defined distances between photon receptors and electron injectors with electron transfers traveling down defined homochiral polypeptide chains. This statement not only blurs the line of realism, but it is fallacious. "Quote, after much trial and error, one protocell assembles the complicated molecular machinery that enables it to divide into daughter cells. This paves the way for the first living microbial community." Unquote. There is neither a demonstration on how molecular machinery is made, nor even a proposal. The mechanisms needed for cellular division are highly complex, requiring cascades of enzymes functioning in precise and timed manner. This is utterly inconceivable based on the demonstrated results, and nothing proposed, let alone demonstrated, pays the way for the first living microbial community. This is hype to orders of magnitude extreme, written by the origin of life researchers themselves, and this is what confuses the field. They further write, and these quote, "Ultimately evolve into a primitive metabolism that required by the earliest forms of life." It seems to be commonplace that origin of life researchers are co-opting terms from biology, biological evolution, and moving them into the prebiotic vocabulary. It is unhelpful to do that. Molecules are indifferent to moving toward life. Furthermore, what is a primitive metabolism? There is nothing being metabolized. There is only a condensation polymerization, a simple chemical reaction based upon the addition of nucleophiles to electrophiles. Such a reaction is never referred to as a metabolism within synthetic chemistry. The origin of life assembly claims are akin to buying 20 pounds of sliced turkey meat, adding a gallon of turkey broth, warming, sticking in a few feathers, and suggesting their proto-turkey, primitive turkey, or extant turkey has just been synthesized. Nothing is going to come gobbling out of your pot where you take 20 pounds of turkey meat and you add some turkey broth and warm it up. That's what these guys have done. They took the elements. They just took RNA. They bought. They just bought one nucleotide, one type, and they put that in there. There's nothing there. There's nothing there coming together. And then we're going to learn about RNA. We're going to learn about how unstable it is, chemically unstable. I'm not talking about enzyme unstable, how chemically unstable it is, and the way it has to be packaged and stored in order to keep its integrity. This is this is just utter, utter nonsense.
[Music] Here's where I'm beginning to see some agreement. Clemens Reichert, he wrote an article called "Prebiotic Chemistry and Human Intervention." He writes, "Such a pure chemical scenario is unrealistic prebiotically, but necessary." Further, he writes, "Further, the ideal experiment does not involve any human intervention." He is agreeing with me. If you really want to have a prebiotically relevant reaction, you can't buy pure chemicals. It's unrealistic. You got to use the mixtures you come up with. Secondly, the ideal experiment has no human interaction. So they're devising the most amazing things that they can do, and still they're not even coming close. They're still not even making the building blocks of the building blocks. He's seeing exactly what I'm seeing. He's an origin of life researcher, and he's seeing what I'm seeing. I really appreciate Clemens Reichert for for uh speaking the truth here. This is what we need.
So in summary, some people, not reading the actual origin of life articles, suggests that, "But I don't think it's fair to put the blame on scientists. The blame belongs to the press." And again, some say, "The blame is with the media outlets, not with the scientists." Well, if you read the uh the researchers' articles, you would see there's a lot of blame to go around. The blame starts with them. It's not just the press that hypes the progress and origin of life. The hype begins with the actual research articles themselves. It's not just the layperson that's misled, but it is those teaching in the academy. So this is this is where we are. This is what it is. There's there's a lot of hype to go around. The hype starts with the researchers, and the hype is extreme. And this is what confuses the world. Uh, in the next video, we will get into the real hardcore chemistry. Everything here has been very light on the chemistry. We'll get into the hardcore chemistry, and hopefully I can bring it to a level where you'll understand what's going on, and we'll learn something in the process, and we'll see where we are on homework rally.
[Music] Thanks for joining us. If you want to subscribe, just click right here. Subscribe, and we'll give you a shout out when the next video in this series comes out. Thank you.