- Joan Oró
Joan Oró i Florensa (
October 26 ,1923 –September 2, 2004) was a Spanish Catalan biochemist, Marquess of Oró, whose research has been of importance in understanding theorigin of life .Oró was born in
Lleida ,Catalonia ,Spain , onOctober 26 ,1923 . From the 1960s he worked withNASA on the Viking missions which explored the planet Mars. His work was essential in the analysis of samples of Martian soil, and suggested that there was in fact no life on Mars.One of his most important contributions was the prebiotic synthesis of the
nucleobase adenine (a key component ofnucleic acids ) fromhydrogen cyanide .This was achieved during the period 1959–1962 and stands, together with theMiller-Urey experiment, as one of the fundamental results ofprebiotic chemistry . It opened up a research area eventually leading to the complete synthesis of other components of nucleic acids. He was also the first scientist pointing towardscomets as the carriers of organic molecules to our earlybiosphere . This conjecture (formulated in 1961) is largely accepted today.Oró also provided a chemical interpretation of a set of remarkable results reported by the Viking mission to Mars. The Viking lander performed a series of experiments, including one designed by Oró, involving a small gas chromatograph and mass spectrometer. In one of these experiments, where a set of nutrients was mixed with Martian soil samples, a sudden production of carbon dioxide was reported, initially suggesting the presence of Martian microbes, which would have shown some kind of metabolic processing of nutrients. Oró showed that a simpler, abiotic interpretation was more likely to be the correct one: the catalytic chemical oxidation of test nutrients.
He was awarded, among other honors, the Cross of Civil Order of Alfonso X el Sabio (
Madrid , 1983), theAlexander Ivanovich Oparin Medal Award from the ISSOL (Berkeley, 1986), theCreu de Sant Jordi (1991), and the Medalla del PresidentFrancesc Macià (2000).He died in
Barcelona ,Catalonia , Spain, onSeptember 2 2004 .External links
* [http://www.fjo.es/index2.html Joan Oró Foundation]
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