Origin of Life

Abstract

Whether you think of it as a revolution story, an evolution story, or even, simply, a history tale, reading this book by the science writer Jacob Berkowitz is like going on a discovery walk through the annals of who’s-who in astrobiology, a budding new field that studies the origin, evolution, and distribution of life on earth, in the universe, and more. It is filled with name-dropping, anecdotes (a bit of an overload of them), birthing analogies, and puns.NASA’s 1999 Stardust mission spent 200 million dollars to bring back stardust material that weighs less than a grain of salt, and now, we have a “catalog of more than ten thousand pre-solar grains” (5–7 billion years old). Hoagy Carmichael wrote and recorded it, Bing Crosby, Louis Armstrong, Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra, Doris Day, Ringo Starr, and Rod Stewart (to name a few) sang about the “Stardust of yesterday,” but Joni Mitchell was the one who got it right: “We are stardust.” Berkowitz claims that “the central realization of the Stardust Revolution” is that “stars are our direct ancestors.”Some of the terminology really is fun: “stardust,” “starfluff,” “astrominerals,” “extraterrestrial amino acids,” “molecular astrophysics,” and did you know that Townes’s “maser” (microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation) was the predecessor of the optical light version we now know as the “laser”? Remember the old children’s rhyme: “Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are…like a diamond in the sky” – well, guess what, x-ray diffraction has shown that “nano-diamonds,” the perfect size for “engagement rings for bacteria,” were formed around stars! In genetics, we look for 16SrRNA signatures to identify new species, while astronomers look for light and sound signatures.The book discusses the fact that water is everywhere, including in space – remember that it has been known as the “universal solvent” (see the pun?). It describes the “Goldilocks zone,” the “cosmic water fight to see who can find the oldest water,” how water forms on “cosmic dust,” a recipe for making DNA building blocks, and what moves at a speed of “about twenty-four billion times a second.” It also exposes what the NASA committee “on the Limits of Organic Life in Planetary Systems,” a subcommittee of the “Committee on the Origins and Evolution of Life” left off – a definition of life!Many of the stories include interesting perspectives of well-known characters from the annals of science from a fresh perspective, such as how Louis Pasteur ended up coming up with his famous sterilization technique (hint – it was in a competition). Find out about William Crookes’s “Genesis of the Elements” and Steve Benner’s synthesis of an enzyme, which “helped to found the now-booming field of synthetic biology.” Anecdotes about Robert Bunsen (yes, of Bunsen burner fame) and Kirchhoff and others involved in the early work in astrophysics are fascinating and made for a change in the perspective of this reviewer. Others tales include a new angle on Newton as alchemist, Kelvin and his work on the sun, and the blind astronomer. We can read about how telescope upgrades led to false conclusions, how the Cold War played into discoveries and publication races. Indeed, descriptions of collaborations, how new science is built upon older material, but also how there is cutthroat competition, how careers are ruined, and some Nobel Prize politics should prove an interesting, eye-opening read for those looking in on science from the sidelines.The book does have a few shortcomings, such as the mixed use of metric and U.S. standards, as acknowledged, instead of the SI (Le Système International d’Unités) notation we all teach. It was also hard for this reader to find an exact “revolution.” A timeline chart would have been a nice addition to the book, an aid to those using it as reference material. A few more relevant biology-related concepts could also have been included, such as noting the full variety of Earth’s extremophiles – microbes that grow under many extreme conditions – can serve as models for how life may survive elsewhere.From the perspective of a biology educator, this book may be of some value as a resource of interesting anecdotes about how life could be put together on earth, with a heavy load of physics and chemistry mixed in. Educators may want to pull out the individual stories to share with the classroom and expand their students’ universe.