| Alexander Oparin | |
| Native Name: | Александр Опарин |
| Native Name Lang: | ru |
| Birth Date: | 2 March 1894[1] |
| Birth Place: | Uglich, Yaroslavl Governorate, Russian Empire |
| Death Place: | Moscow, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union |
| Fields: | Biochemistry |
| Workplaces: | Moscow State University USSR Academy of Sciences |
| Alma Mater: | Moscow State University |
| Known For: | Contributions to the theory of the origin of life Coacervates |
Alexander Ivanovich Oparin (Russian: Александр Иванович Опарин; – 21 April 1980) was a Soviet biochemist notable for his theories about the origin of life and for his book The Origin of Life.
He also studied the biochemistry of material processing by plants and enzyme reactions in plant cells. He showed that many food production processes were based on biocatalysis and developed the foundations for industrial biochemistry in the USSR.
Oparin was born in Uglich in 1894 into a merchant family. He and his parents soon moved to Kokayevo, a nearby village. Oparin had an older brother,, who became an economist.[2]
Oparin graduated from the Moscow State University in 1917 and became a professor of biochemistry there in 1927. Many of his early papers were about plant enzymes and their role in metabolism.[3] His first experimental studies were devoted to the chemistry of respiration. In them, he showed that chlorogenic acid is an essential component of redox reactions in the cell.[4] In 1924 he put forward a hypothesis suggesting that life on Earth developed through a gradual chemical evolution of carbon-based molecules in the Earth's primordial soup. In 1935, along with academician Aleksei Bach, he founded the Biochemistry Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. In 1939, Oparin became a Corresponding Member of the Academy, and, in 1946, a full member. In 1937, he organized the Department of Technical Biochemistry at the Moscow Technological Institute of Food Industry.[4]
In 1940s and 1950s, Oparin supported the theories of Trofim Lysenko and Olga Lepeshinskaya, who made claims about "the origin of cells from noncellular matter". "Taking the party line" helped advance his career.[5] However, according to cytologist :[6]
From 1942 to 1960, Oparin headed the Department of Plant Biochemistry at Moscow State University, where he gave lectures on general biochemistry, technical biochemistry, and special courses on enzymology and the problem of the origin of life.[4] In 1970, he was elected President of the International Society for the Study of the Origins of Life.
Oparin was one of the academicians of the USSR Academy of Sciences who signed a letter from scientists to the newspaper Pravda in 1973 condemning "the behavior of Academician A.D. Sakharov." The letter accused Sakharov of having "made a number of statements discrediting the political system, foreign and domestic policies of the Soviet Union," and the academics assessed his human rights activities as "discrediting the honor and dignity of the Soviet scientist."[7] [8]
Oparin died in Moscow on 21 April 1980, and was interred in Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow.[9]
Oparin became Hero of Socialist Labour in 1969, received the Lenin Prize in 1974, and was awarded the Lomonosov Gold Medal in 1979 "for outstanding achievements in biochemistry". He was also a five-time recipient of the Order of Lenin.
Although Oparin's started out reviewing various panspermia theories, including those of Hermann von Helmholtz and William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), he was primarily interested in how life began. As early as 1922, he asserted that:
Oparin outlined a way he thought that basic organic chemicals might have formed into microscopic localized systems, from which primitive living things could have developed. He cited work done by de Jong and Sidney W. Fox on coacervates and research by others, including himself, into organic chemicals which, in solution, might spontaneously form droplets and layers. Oparin suggested that different types of coacervates could have formed in the Earth's primordial ocean and been subject to a selection process that led, eventually, to life.
While Oparin himself was unable to conduct experiments to test any of these ideas, later researchers tried. In 1953, Stanley Miller attempted an experiment to investigate whether chemical self-organization could have been possible on pre-historic Earth. The Miller–Urey experiment[10] introduced heat (to provide reflux) and electrical energy (sparks, to simulate lightning) into a mixture of several simple components that would be present in a reducing atmosphere. Within a fairly short period of time a variety of familiar organic compounds, such as amino acids, were synthesised. The compounds that formed were somewhat more complex than the molecules present at the beginning of the experiment.
The Communist Party's official interpretation of Marxism, dialectical materialism, fit Oparin's speculation on the origins of life as 'a flow, an exchange, a dialectical unity'. This notion was re-enforced by Oparin's association with Lysenko.[11]