- Leslie Orgel
Leslie Eleazer Orgel FRS (
January 12 ,1927 –October 27 ,2007 ) was a British chemist.Born in
London, England , Orgel received his B.A. in chemistry with first class honors from Oxford University in 1949. In 1950 he was elected a Fellow of Magdalen College and in 1951 was awarded his Ph.D in chemistry at Oxford.Orgel started his career as a theoretical inorganic chemist and continued his studies in this field at Oxford, the
California Institute of Technology and theUniversity of Chicago . In 1955 he joined the chemistry department atCambridge University . There he did work in transition metal chemistry, published articles and wrote a textbook entitled Transition Metal Chemistry: Ligand Field Theory (1960).In 1964 Orgel was appointed Senior Fellow and Research Professor at the
Salk Institute for Biological Studies , where he directed the Chemical Evolution Laboratory. He was also an adjunct professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at theUniversity of California, San Diego , and he was one of five principal investigators in theNASA -sponsored NSCORT program in exobiology. Orgel also participated in NASA's Viking Mars Lander Program as a member of the Molecular Analysis Team that designed the gas chromatography mass spectrometer instrument that robots took to the planetMars .Orgel’s lab came across an economical way to make cytarabine, a compound that is one of today’s most commonly used anti-cancer agents.
During the 1970s, Orgel suggested reconsidering the
Panspermia hypothesis, according to which the earliest forms of life on earth did not originate here, but arrived fromouter space with meteorites.Together with
Stanley Miller , Orgel also suggested thatpeptide nucleic acid s - rather thanribonucleic acid s - constituted the first pre-biotic Systems capable ofself-replication onearly Earth .His name is popularly known because of
Orgel's rule s, credited to him, particularly Orgel's Second Rule: "Evolution is cleverer than you are".In his book "The Origins of Life", Orgel coined the concept of
specified complexity , to describe the criterion by which living organisms are distinguished from non-living matter. He has published over three hundred articles in his research areas.Orgel died of cancer on October 27th of 2007 at the San Diego Hospice & Palliative Care in
San Diego, California .Awards
* National Academy of Sciences
* Fellow of the Royal Society of London
* American Academy of Arts and SciencesPublications
*Leslie E. Orgel, "An Introduction to Transition-Metal Chemistry. The Ligand Field Theory", 1961
*Leslie E. Orgel, "The Origins of Life: Molecules and Natural Selection", 1973
*Leslie E. Orgel and Stanley L. Miller, "The Origins of Life on the Earth", 1974External links
* [http://orpheus.ucsd.edu/speccoll/testing/html/mss0176a.html#abstract Leslie Orgel's Paper Register at UCSD]
* [http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0060018&ct=1 The Implausibility of Metabolic Cycles on the Prebiotic Earth]
* [http://www.salk.edu/faculty/faculty_details.php?id=39 Leslie Orgel's Salk Institute homepage]
* LA Times: [http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-orgel31oct31,1,1184418.story?page=1&ctrack=1&cset=true&coll=la-news-obituaries "Leslie Orgel, 80; chemist was father of the RNA world theory of the origin of life"] , October31, 2007
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