> From: Paul Davies <Paul.Davies@asu.edu>
> Date: 18 June 2008 11:17:05 PM
> To: "Chris Mann" <chris.mann@velocitynet.com.au>
> Subject: RE: Regarding recent Murchison meteorite research - Wikinews
>
> This result merely confirms what we all along assumed - that the
> Murchsion amino acids are extraterrestrial and not contaminants.
> But making amino acids is NOT very significant for the origin of
> life, as I explain in my book The Fifth Miracle (called The Origin
> of Life in the UK). It's like the difference between making bricks
> and making a house. You can make amino acids (and bricks) in high
> school labs, but assembling them into a complex structure (peptide
> chains of an appropriate configuration, walls and windows of an
> appropriate configuration) is much, much harder (and best not
> attempted by students!). The reason stems from the fact that the
> formation of amino acids is thermodynamically favored, so will
> happen automatically under a range of conditions ("even an idiot
> could make them"), whereas assembling complex combinations of them
> is a delicate process that needs careful intervention. Nobody knows
> how that step (amino acids forming peptides to make proteins) can
> happen abiotically. And perhaps it didn't. Why not? Well, I think
> amino acids are a red herring in the origin of life story - a
> hangover from the Miller-Urey experiment. Life is all about
> information - its replication and processing. The basis for this is
> nucleic acids, not amino acids, and the former are not (yet) found
> in nature except in life. If we figure out how information
> replicating structures got going, then there is plenty of scope for
> them to eventually discover how to make peptides.
>
> Hope this helps.
>
> Paul Davies
>
> ________________________________
>
> From: Chris Mann [mailto:chris.mann@velocitynet.com.au]
> Sent: Wed 6/18/2008 1:59 AM
> To: Paul Davies
> Subject: Regarding recent Murchison meteorite research - Wikinews
>
>
>
> Dear Professor Davies,
>
> I am a reporter for the citizen journalism website Wikinews
> (http:// <http:///>
> en.wikinews.org), and I am writing a story on the recent findings
> regarding the Murchison meteorite ("Extraterrestrial nucleobases in
> the Murchison meteorite", Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Sunday
> 15 June 2008). As a regarded astrobiologist, I would like to hear
> your opinion on the findings.
>
> By my understanding, the discovery of unknown or relatively rare
> amino acids in the meteorite has been the basis for arguments that
> the amino acids are extraterrestrial, but this recent study instead
> used NMR to measure the amount of carbon-13 in the nucleobases, and
> claims that the high prevalence of C13 as an indicator that the
> nucleobases, similarly, did not originate on Earth. Is this a fair
> representation of the results? Do you believe that this provides
> strong evidence of an extraterrestrial source of some, if not all, of
> the building blocks of life on Earth, or do you agree more with
> Robert Shapiro of New York University, who believes that in the
> context of life on Earth, meteoritic nucleobases were "unimportant
> and insignificant"?
>
> Thank you,
>
> Chris Mann
> http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/User:Chris_Mann
>
>
