Genesis: The Scientific Quest for Life's Origins | Robert Hazen

Genesis: The Scientific Quest for Life's Origins | Robert Hazen | the best

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Genesis: The Scien...

	Genesis: The Scientific Quest for Life's Origins Robert Hazen Joseph Henry Press, 2007 - 368 pages average customer review:based on 21 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Life on Earth arose nearly 4 billion years ago, bursting forth from air, water, and rock. Though the process obeyed all the rules of chemistry and physics, the details of that original event pose as deep a mystery as any facing science. How did non-living chemicals become alive? While the question is (deceivingly) simple, the answers are unquestionably complex. Science inevitably plays a key role in any discussion of life's origins, dealing less with the question of why life appeared on Earth than with where, when, and how it emerged on the blasted, barren face of our primitive planet. Astrobiologist Robert Hazen has spent many years dealing with the fundamental questions of life's genesis. As an active research scientist, he is down deep in all the messy details that science has to offer on the subject, tracing the inexorable sequence of events that led to the complicated interactions of carbonbased molecules. As he takes us through the astounding process of emergence, we are witness to the first tentative steps toward life - from the unfathomable abundance of carbon biomolecules synthesized in the black vacuum of space to the surface of the Earth to deep within our planet's restless crust. We are privy to the breathtaking drama that rapidly unfolds as life prevails. The theory of emergence is poised to answer a multitude of questions - even as it raises the possibility that natural processes exist beyond what we now know, perhaps beyond what we even comprehend. Genesis tells the tale of transforming scientific advances in our quest for life's origins. Written with grace, beauty, and authority, it goes directly to the heart of who we are and why we are here.

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Emergence on Earth . . . and elsewhere??

Putting it back to front, Hazen lists the three likely scenarios for life's origins: a chemical process leading to metabolism, a chemical process leading to replication, or a combination of the two. The remainder of the book is an exploration of the ideas centered on the way life was started on this planet and the researchers who have conceived or tested them. The list of scientists involved is extensive, but in this finely crafted work, Hazen is able to introduce them, describe their work - and his own - clearly and effectively. With the advantage of arriving at "Life's Origins" studies from an "outside" discipline - geophysics - the author brings a fine sense of detachment to this presentation.

In any other account on this topic, the opening would inevitably be a reference to Charles Darwin's "warm little pond". The "warm little pond" idea was tested in 1953 by Stanley Miller, who figures significantly in this story. Darwin's "first cell" clearly required simpler precursors to be assembled and put in operation. As an earth scientist, Hazen is more interested in the role played by chemistry and physics than cell biology, and so begins the book with water's changing properties under increased temperature and pressure. This situation plays a more significant role in life's beginnings than we might guess, since one scenario for the initial steps lies deep in the Earth where water, essential to life, lies buried in rocks, hot and compressed. As it turns out, that water is home to living things - microbes that may not reproduce for over a thousand years, as contrasted with the microbes in your gut that reproduce every twenty minutes. It's a major change in scenarios, going from a little pond to the restrictive environment of the Earth's depths, but Hazen shows how each circumstance has contributed to better understanding of how life came to be. Further, the mechanisms are simple enough to be readily applied on any planet with a suitable environment.

The author weaves a number of research accounts into a broad tapestry he calls "emergence". The point of emergence is that there are no great leaps - life had to be built up through a succession of small, cumulative steps. Each step was a chemical process in the proper environment contributing some minimal change that ultimately became what we now call life. Carbon, he reminds us, is the key, but it does little by itself. Water is an essential factor, because its components are essential to building organic molecules. Each of the steps, so far as they are known, are described and fit into the role of life. More important, and in a significant departure from many books on this topic, Hazen describes the laboratory experiments that have verified suppositions or raised new possibilities about life's formation. Field work is not ignored here. The author describes the discovery of life around sea-floor vents and the implications of the Murchison Meteorite - which delivered dozens of types of amino acids - those famous "building blocks" of life to an Australian paddock. How do these highly diverse scenarios merge to produce the trees, pet turtles and people around us we see today?

That's what remains to be revealed. The gaps in the processes leading to the first true cell must be closed with descriptions of how various components came together. Many researchers have contributed to resolving those "hows" [there's more than one], and it's in this area that Hazen's three-option conclusion is so significant. For most organic chemical processes to take place, the operation requires protection from interference - a surrounding defensive environment. How does a complex carbon molecule build a protective "shell" while it's busy with its own affairs making new compounds? If the shell already exists - and those lab experiments now demonstrate how that can happen, how does the carbon assemblage break in and take sanctuary from a hostile world? Teasing out the answers to these questions has been the work of many scientists, particularly over the past couple of generations.

Life's origins researchers are an irascible lot, sometimes. It's a bit discouraging to read that Stanley Miller, who broke new ground [or perhaps not - German Walter Löb had performed similar work decades before], by generating amino acids in a flask, dismisses the notion of sea-floor vents generating life-promoting processes. And former astronomer Thomas Gold inexplicably rejects any contribution from space to the establishment of life here. The most compelling anecdote in this book however, is of an almost overage PhD student who works out how organic molecules can use - or adapt - the methods rocks use making in crystals. Nick Platt considers this establishes the underlying conditions needed for those molecules which "stack" in layers to create areas leading to the formation of "an information-rich molecule" - RNA, then DNA . Hazen negotiates these troubled conceptual waters with assurance, providing us with a compelling story - or set of stories - relating our beginnings. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

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the best

I don't usually comment on books widely reviewed here or elsewhere but I have to say that this is a gem. If you are interested in "origin of life" science, particularly emergent systems, this is the book for you.

A survey of Origins of Life research from a leader in the field

Hazen surveys then-current ideas and research on the origins of life. He makes considerable effort to keep it exciting and personal by including stories of research as it happens. I especially appreciated the non-magical discussion of emergence in early chapters; it is a phenomenon which unfortunately is used as an excuse by some to hide or inject magic into the process. Hazen reviews what has been done and what has not been done in the exploration of various ideas about prebiotic chemistry, the RNA World theory (which is accepted by most biologists today) and current cellular life, and attempts to bridge the various stages. The book may leave the reader with the impression that the field is rather chaotic with huge scientific challenges remaining, since Hazen does not come to many conclusions. Unfortunately this impression seems to be accurate. Perhaps young proto-scientists should view this in a positive light: there is still a lot of scientific discovery remaining.

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A Personal View from a Scientist

Robert Hazen presents a general feeling for what it is like to be a scientist researching the origin of life. The impression one gets is that there are a lot of ideas about abiogenesis, but not much data with which to sort through these possibilities.

Hazen does an good job of presenting the various hypotheses on the relevant concepts. However, he also ends up talking just as much about the personalities engaged in the research as he does talking about the ideas themselves.

Good Chemistry Dominated Look at Life's Possible Origins

This book is a rather good overview of major scientific inquiries into the origin of life, as well as a few interesting side journeys into lesser known and (as of now) lesser quantified theories.

Hazen as a minerologist has a rather unique take on teh origin for life: not only does he take you on the regular tours from the chemical soupy stews of Miller and Urey, thermophilic bacteria of the black smokers, and exploring the mysteries of the carbon-based life forms, he also does all of the above with an eye for what is happening at a chemical bonding level. That, in my opinion, makes this book a little more interesting thn you regular tour of the usual suspects for the advent of life.

Hazen starts basically divides the book into two segments. One is the "top down" approach -- looking at life and extrapolating from exant life forms how such life forms could have come about, and also the "bottom-up" approach -- looking at possible chemical combinations that could possibly yield recurrent metabolism and capability to evolve (ie, have the abilty to trasfer information).

Some rather interesting byways in the current search for life include Hazen's own work on Left-Right crystal formation, and the advent of chemical concentrates as a result of natural events in the early earth. All of this is done with a proper appreciation for the ideas, good research papers cited and a list for further reading.

I really would have wished that the author would have included a short overview of "further reading" of a strictly non-academic background. While this book is of benefit to both the academic and those who are just interested in science (such as myself), I suspect that the vast majority of his readers are the latter. I would have like a segment to take me into more literature of a non-academic nature, a sort of overview of the current popular literature on the subject would have been helpful. If Mr. Hazen does publish another book, I would surely purchase it.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

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