[...]
>
>Ok, Kevin, where was Fox when this was all presumably taking place on the
>primitive earth? Who obtained and purified the amino acids, and measured
>and mixed the purified amino acids, and maintained the conditions and
>temperature just right? As for catalytic, that certainly is not
>demonstrated to my satrisfaction. One of his grad students who was
>involved in the experiments urged Fox to use sterile conditions for the
>experiments, but he didn't. The student calculated that the presence of
>one bacterium in the mixture could have accounted for all the catalytic
>activity observed by Fox. Asa for relevance, most paleobiogeochemists
>reject Fox's work as irrelevant to abiogenesis. You should join them.
>
Here's what Stanley Miller had to say about Fox's microspheres:
The proposed protocells of Corliss _et al._ are undefined.
If they envision microspheres of Fox, then we can say that
these are poor precursors to a living organism. No one has
ever claimed that Fox's microspheres are living, and it is
generally agreed that the microspheres were not on the
evolutionary pathway to the first living organisms.
-- S.L. Miller and J.L. Bada, 1988, "Submarine Hot Springs and
the Origin of Life," _Nature_, <334>:609.
>>
>>As for the question of control, I assume that, clever biochemist though he
>>was, Fox could not control the physiochemical mechanisms of nature, and
>>therefore could not force amino acids to polymerize against their will into
>>catalytic molecules. But since you were a student of his you would know him
>>better than I would, so I guess I could be wrong.
>
>Sounds to me like Fox was doing exactly that: manipulating the
>physicochemical mechanisms of nature to produce a result that could not
>have occurred in an abiogenic setting at all. You decide whether you are
>wrong.
To help in the decision, here's an abbreviated set of directions
for making proteinoids and proteinoid microspheres [kids, don't
try this at home ;-)] :
==============================
_Preparation of proteinoid or other polyanhydro-(alpha)-amino acids_
Heat a mixture of amino acids, 3.0 g, for 2-5 hr at 180 C.
This mixture of amino acids can consist of 1.0 g each of
aspartic acid and glutamic acid plus 1.0 g of any other
amino acid or a mixture of amino acids.
_Preparation of microsheres_
To hot polymer, add 10 ml boiling 1.0% NaCl solution slowly
with stirring (care !), boil 30 sec, stir, decant hot clear
solution. Allow to cool with agitation and examine the cooled
solution under a high-powered microscope by oil immersion.
-- Sidney Fox and Klaus Dose, _Molecular Evolution and the
Origin of Life_, W.H. Freeman, 1972. Appendix.
===============================
Hey, this sounds like a reasonable prebiotic setting to me,
what's your problem Art? :-)
Brian Harper
Associate Professor
Applied Mechanics
The Ohio State University
"He who establishes his arguments
by noise and command shows that
reason is weak" -- Montaigne