Origins of Life: a couple cool links

[Tiassa]

For your consideration ....

I tuned into an interview today on "The Beat", a production of Seattle's KUOW 94.9 FM. Normally they talk to writers, musicians ... I once heard a talk with the guy who does the subtitles for the Seattle Opera. But today, they were recycling an interview from April with Dr. Robert Hazen, a Carnegie Institution research scientist and Clarence Robinson Professor of Earth Science at George Mason University. Dr. Hazen is also the author of Genesis: The Scientific Quest for Life's Origins. It's an interesting segment that discusses the emergence of life, Hazen's research into deep-sea origins of life on Earth, the interdisciplinary aspects of the search, the nature of scientists behind closed doors, Mars, and there's even a good joke about a religious cult.

I offer the following link mostly as a resource for anyone interested; the link below is the one I pulled out of iTunes after launching the .m3u:

http://www.kuow.org/MP3Low/MP3/Beat/Beat20070822.mp3​

Skip forward to fourteen minutes into the show; the segment lasts about eighteen minutes.

The interview strikes me coincidentally, although perhaps whoever decided to run the archived segment read the same bit I picked up from Wired.com:

In a computer model of inorganic particles in plasma, researchers from the Russian Academy of Science, the University of Sydney and the Max-Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics watched plasma-state inorganic dust organize itself, twisting into strands that look and act a bit like DNA .... (Keim)

The Wired.com article points to an Institute of Physics press release by the title, "Physicists Discover Inorganic Dust With Lifelike Qualities", which provides the quotes for Keim's entry, and also to a paper from the New Journal of Physics, "From plasma crystals and helical structures towards inorganic living matter". The abstract is reproduced below:

Complex plasmas may naturally self-organize themselves into stable interacting helical structures that exhibit features normally attributed to organic living matter. The self-organization is based on non-trivial physical mechanisms of plasma interactions involving over-screening of plasma polarization. As a result, each helical string composed of solid microparticles is topologically and dynamically controlled by plasma fluxes leading to particle charging and over-screening, the latter providing attraction even among helical strings of the same charge sign. These interacting complex structures exhibit thermodynamic and evolutionary features thought to be peculiar only to living matter such as bifurcations that serve as `memory marks', self-duplication, metabolic rates in a thermodynamically open system, and non-Hamiltonian dynamics. We examine the salient features of this new complex `state of soft matter' in light of the autonomy, evolution, progenity and autopoiesis principles used to define life. It is concluded that complex self-organized plasma structures exhibit all the necessary properties to qualify them as candidates for inorganic living matter that may exist in space provided certain conditions allow them to evolve naturally. (Tsytovich et al)

Anyway, it will take me a while to read through it, and even longer to understand it, but the whole thing seems rather quite cool. Both links brought to mind the question of how life arose from lifelessness. In Hazen's case, I'm sure of the connection. The NJP article, well, it seems to be yet another milepost on a long and arduous journey, but I could be wrong.

At any rate, for your enlightenment, amusement, or, if such is the case, disgust.