Oparin, Alexander

Those concepts are not new. They were initiated in the ideas of Alexander Oparin during the first half of the 20th century, and a limited but accurate scheme of this type was presented by Eakin.45 A summary of the ideas of a number of contributors—including Harold Morowitz, Christian de Duve, Gunther Wachtershauser, Stuart Kauffmann, Freeman Dyson, Michael Russell, and Doron Lancet—can be found in a review by Fry.46... 

In order to illustrate their idea, Varela and Maturana used the tale (already exploited by Alexander Oparin) of a green man from Mars who comes to Earth and wants to discover what kind of life exists on our planet. He makes a long list of terrestrial objects but is not so sure about their living status, and asks a farmer to help him. The farmer takes a look at the list and immediately divides the objects in two columns, living at the left and not-living at the right ... 

The first scientific theories on the origin of life were proposed by Alexander Oparin in 1924 and by J.B.S. Haldane in 1929. Oparin discovered that a solution of proteins can spontaneously produce microscopic aggregates - which he called coacervates - that are capable of a weak metabolism, and proposed that the first cells came into being by the evolution of primitive metabolic coacervates. Haldane, on the other hand, was highly impressed by the replication properties of viruses, and attributed the origin of life to the evolution of viruslike molecular replicators. 

In fact, the main assumption in the field is still the one proposed by Alexander Oparin in the late 1920s that life originated on this planet from a prebiotic molecular evolution, namely a series of successive spontaneous chemical steps that brought about a gradual increase of size and specificity (complexity) up to the staggering level of the living cell. 

The first hypothesis of this type for explaining the appearance of life on our planet was due to the Russian biochemist Alexander I. Oparin and independently by the British evolutionary biologist John B. S. Haldane, and is more than 50 years old. The basic idea in the Oparin-Haldane hypothesis is that the atmosphere contained only reducing molecules mentioned previously under (2), during the first few thousand million years of its existence. 

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