The Key West Citizen

Basis Of Life May Be Found Through Tests

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - From simple chemicals which presumably existed on the dead earth millions of years ago scientists have produced substances they believe to be identical with those which formed the first living things.

These materials include an assortment of amino acids, the constituents of protein, and finally combinations of these acids into protein-like materials. Protein is the basic substance of living matter.

The steps they followed in the test tube experiments were something like those taken by other scientists in attempting to synthesize protein, one of the great goals of biological science.

However, their object was not to make protein for its own sake but to demonstrate how the first building blocks of life could have been formed.

These scientists presented the results of their work in papers before the American Chemical Society yesterday.

Dr. Stanley L. Miller of Columbia University showed how he produced amino acids from methane, a common natural gas, water, hydrogen and ammonia, with the aid of an electrical discharge.

Miller followed the conclusions of other scientists that the young, lifeless earth had these substances in its air and ocean water, and that their coming together could have been the result of lightning flashes during storms.

He demonstrated also his idea of how more complicated materials such as the basic materials for self-reproduction of the first primitive cells may have been produced under similar conditions.

A slightly different procedure was postulated by Dr. Philip Abelson of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. He expressed belief that the original raw chemicals, hydrogen, water and carbon dioxide, came from the gas of erupting volcanoes, and that mild volcanic heat put them together in combinations similar to those of Dr. Miller.

The protein-like substances made from these primitive building blocks were produced by Dr. Sidney W. Fox of Florida State University through the use of heat.

Whether this primitive substance has biological activity - that is, the ability to accumulate other simple substances and use them to build itself into something alive or nearly alive - Dr. Fox declined to say.