The Origin of Life? All in a Day's Work

This was a long way from making life in a test tube -- the simplest organism is vastly more complicated than anything in the Miller-Urey experiment -- but it set a template for the field of prebiotic chemistry. Miller made chemistry look like a powerfully creative force.

The ventists are apostates. They are blasphemers. Perhaps life didn't begin at the surface of the Earth, they say, but rather deep beneath the sea around a hydrothermal vent. Such geysers form along mid-ocean ridges, spewing hot water into a dark, cold, pressurized realm that teems with bizarre organisms, like giant clams and 6-foot tube worms. The ventists say the disequilibrium between the hot and cold water is a natural driver of interesting chemical reactions. This would be a good place to cook up organic molecules from which life could emerge and evolve, they say. Moreover, the deep hydrothermal environment would have been protected from harsh ultraviolet sunlight and the meteor bombardments common at the surface of the young Earth.

In other words, it's where we humans live, on the surface, that might be the truly exotic environment. Perhaps life's miracle is not that it learned to live at the bottom of the sea, but somehow in the sunshine.

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On a knoll of bedrock on the edge of Rock Creek Park, tucked on a back street called Broad Branch Road, is a little scientific fiefdom called the Carnegie Institution. On the third floor of the Geophysical Lab you'll find the aforementioned Robert Hazen -- a proud ventist.

You may have read one of his 19 books (such as "Science Matters," written with James Trefil), or taken one of his science classes at George Mason University. Or maybe you've seen him play classical trumpet in a symphony orchestra. He's somewhat all over the place as scientists go. About a decade ago, after years as a crystallographer, studying rocks, he turned his attention to the origin of life.

The result is a new book, "genesis: The Scientific Quest for Life's Origin," a rambling tour of a controversial field. We learn about the theory of A.G. Cairns-Smith, that life began as clay. We learn about the Iron-Sulfur World of the German patent attorney and chemist Gunter Wachtershauser, described as quick to fire off an angry letter on legal stationery. We learn about the Protenoid World, championed by the late Sidney Fox, who cooked up in a lab tiny spheres that he thought possessed "rudimentary consciousness."

Amid all the chemistry are scenes of scientific rancor, as when Hazen describes a face-off between two scientists, Martin Brasier and William Schopf, over some alleged 3.5-billion-year-old fossils:

"As Brasier calmly outlined his arguments, the scene on stage shifted from awkwardly tense to utterly bizarre. We watched amazed as Schopf paced forward to a position just a few feet to the right of the speaker's podium. He leaned sharply toward Brazier and seemed to glare, his eyes boring holes in the unperturbed speaker."

Hazen writes that the origin-of-life field is "at times tarnished by questionable data, contentious debates, or even outright quackery."

Now you can see how all this might get a bit delicate given the current debate about intelligent design. Hazen knows that by exposing the backstage bickering on the origin of life, he may give ammunition to the critics of the scientific community: "Anything I say that shows any uncertainty or doubt, they will use as evidence that scientists are baffled."

His friend Harold Morowitz, another prominent origins researcher, says of Hazen, "He is walking into the middle of a lot of crossfires."