The next time I get to teach an origin-of-life course, I will likely use Michael Marshall’s new book, The Genesis Quest, as supplementary reading. I’ve taught the class twice, and our primary activity is to read and discuss the primary literature. Alongside those tough-to-digest articles in all their science-jargon glory, I sprinkle in readings from a book aimed at the wider public. The first time, we read selections from Robert Hazen’s Genesis, and the second time we used David Deamer’s First Life as a guide.
Unlike Hazen and Deamer who are both working and practicing scientists, Marshall is a journalist and science writer. This gives his book a very different feel. He gives you a sense of the science in broad strokes, peppering in anecdotes and analogies, rather than trying to give you the “right” scientific details. Also, he focuses on people-stories, as apparent in the subtitle of his book: “The Geniuses and Eccentrics on a Journey to Uncover the Origin of Life on Earth”.
If you wanted a combination of journalist and scientist, there’s Bill Messler and Jim Cleaves’ recent book A Brief History of Creation, but I found it less suitable for my class, and I think Marshall hits the appropriate complementary notes. In my most recent class, I sensed that what students found more fascinating than the science was any anecdotal droppings I would make about the scientists and the field in more general terms, including the many controversies and personalities involved. I’ve met many of the “geniuses” profiled by Marshall in his book, although I don’t know most of them personally as I’m an outsider who hasn’t worked in the origins-of-life field for very long. I don’t attend many conferences and panels, and my contact with famous-named scientists was usually brief and focused on the science.
I enjoyed Marshall’s arrangement of the material. He begins the story with individuals involved in the controversies surrounding vitalism and spontaneous generation before quickly moving on to Oparin, Haldane, Urey, and Miller – the last name being the famous Stanley Miller whose 1953 experiment marks the kick-off frenzy into prebiotic chemistry research. 1953 was also the year Watson & Crick published their famous paper on the double helix of DNA. Marshall picks up on this story and does a nice job describing the key tenets (and problems) of the RNA World, the dominant theory in the field, and of course all the personalities behind it.
The most interesting eccentric genius profiled is the late Graham Cairns-Smith. I’ve never met him, but I devoted one class period to discussing his Clay World theories. The students found it interesting but abstract; they also think it implausible compared to the RNA World which they find the most compelling. I don’t reveal to the students what I think and try to play the role of impartial interlocutor in our discussions. But I didn’t know much about the person Cairns-Smith before reading Marshall’s masterful narrative gleaned from interviews with those who knew him. It’s a very, very interesting story – I won’t provide any spoilers, but that for me was reason enough to read Marshall’s book. It’s Chapter 5 (“Crystal Clear”) for those who are already familiar with the field, but I recommend reading Marshall’s book in sequence because his narrative sets up his individual stories superbly.
Marshall lays out the three main camps in origins-of-life research depending on what you thought came first: genes-first, metabolism-first, compartments-first. Each of these has its subfields along with many variations. There are many interesting personalities behind these ideas, and the proponents of their respective theories have strong arguments – but so do their detractors. Marshall also traces the work in the most recent decade that have blurred the boundaries between the three camps. By and large, most of us in the field now think that things were messier and that elements of the different theories come into play in an ecological cooperative sense. There is evolutionary competition, of course, but the heated arguments of previous decades have died down. Since this past decade was when I joined the field, I didn’t have any entrenched horse to back.
That being said, I’m personally drawn towards some of the ideas of outsiders in the field. One such is Gunter Wachterhauser, a patent lawyer, trained in organic chemistry, who quietly on his own worked for many years to build one is now known as the Iron-Sulfur World where pyrite (FeS2) is a key player. Marshall provides several back-story anecdotes that I hadn’t heard which I found very interesting. I met Wachterhauser once at a conference a few years back where he listened to one of my talks and said it was “interesting”. He seemed a little frail, and my impression was that of a genial elderly gentleman. His papers had given me the impression of a firebrand.
For those in the field, there’s no new science revealed in Marshall’s book; rather it’s a highlight of the key experiments. Students who have taken my most recent class have read the scientific articles that Marshall alludes to. But what Marshall does, which my students found hard to do, was to see things in perspective. That’s hard to do in a one-semester class when you’re diving into the deep end of the pool, steeped in scientific jargon. Marshall provides the important step-back to take in the larger vista. He does this in a very readable book that, in my opinion, gets most things right – although he throws in the occasional materialist/reductionist quip that I think reveals his ignorance in some areas.
The last chapter in The Genesis Quest is appropriately titled “Just Messy Enough” and there’s an epilogue which muses on the meaning of life. Marshall leaves on the right note as to where we are right now in origins-of-life research. It will be very interesting to see how the field has progressed a decade or two from now. But if you want an excellent summary of the last seventy years of active research in easy-to-digest form, I highly recommend The Genesis Quest. I will certainly be telling my students about it.
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