Page 302 - The Miracle in the Cell Membrane

The Miracle in the Cell Membrane

Inconclusive Efforts of the Twentieth
Century
The first evolutionist who took up the subject of the ori-
gin of life in the twentieth century was the renowned
Russian biologist Alexander Oparin. With various theses he
advanced in the 1930s, he tried to prove that a living cell
could originate by coincidence. These studies, however,
were doomed to failure, and Oparin had to make the fol-
lowing confession:
Unfortunately, however, the problem of the origin of the
cell is perhaps the most obscure point in the whole study of
the evolution of organisms. 98
Evolutionist followers of Oparin tried to carry out
experiments to solve this problem. The best known experi-
ment was carried out by the American chemist Stanley
Miller in 1953. Combining the gases he alleged to have
existed in the primordial Earth's atmosphere in an exper-
iment set-up, and adding energy to the mixture, Miller
synthesized several organic molecules (amino acids)
present in the structure of proteins.