Leslie organ

Leslie Eleazer Organ (born January 12, 1927 in London , † October 27, 2007 in San Diego , USA ) was a British chemist . He was a co-founder of the ligand field theory of transition metals and a researcher in the field of chemical evolution .

life and work

Orgel had been Professor and Director of the Laboratory for Chemical Evolution at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies since 1964 and brought the panspermia hypothesis back into the discussion in the 1970s , according to which the earliest forms of life on earth did not arise here, but through meteorites came here from space .

Francis Crick named the rule “ Evolution is cleverer than you are ” ( “ Evolution is smarter than you are ”) after Leslie Orgel as Organ's rule .

Along with Stanley Miller hit organ also the idea that peptide nucleic acids (PNA) - instead of ribonucleic acid (RNA) - the first for the auto-replication enabled präbiotischenen systems formed on the early Earth. Orgel helped develop the analytical instruments for NASA that took the Viking spacecraft to the planet Mars .

In his book The Origins of Life , Orgel coined the term Specified Complexity to describe what distinguishes living organisms from inanimate objects.

Leslie Orgel conducted research at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla and was an adjunct professor at the University of California, San Diego . He was a member of the Royal Society (1962), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1985) and the National Academy of Sciences (1990).

In his private life he was a lover of oriental carpets .

Publications

• An Introduction to Transition-Metal Chemistry. The Ligand Field Theory . 2nd Edition. Methuen, London 1967.
• The Origins of Life. Molecules and Natural Selection . Chapman & Hall, London 1973, ISBN 0-412-11910-2 .
• The Origins of Life on the Earth . Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1974, ISBN 0-13-642082-6 (with Stanley L. Miller).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Jack D. Dunitz, Gerald F. Joyce: Leslie Eleazer organ. 12 January 1927 - 27 October 2007 . In: Biogr. Mems Fell. R. Soc. . 59, March 13, 2013, pp. 277–289. doi : 10.1098 / rsbm.2013.0002 .

Web links

• Orgels homepage at the NASA Specialized Center of Research and Training (NSCORT) in Exobiology ( Memento of October 14, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
• Biographical page about Leslie Orgel on an oriental carpet website
• LA Times: “Leslie Organ, 80; chemist was father of the RNA world theory of the origin of life " , October 31, 2007
• The Implausibility of Metabolic Cycles on the Prebiotic Earth is Leslie Organ's last paper he was working on at the time of his demise.
• Michael Marshall: The secret of how life on earth began , on: BBC - Earth, October 31, 2016