Asignment in Biology 1

Submitted by Adrian Dubadeb

HALDANE
John Burdon Sanderson Haldane was born on November 5, 1892 in Oxford,
England and died on December 1, 1964 in Bhubaneswar, India. He was a British
geneticist, biometrician, physiologist, and populariser of science who opened new paths
of research in population genetics and evolution. Son of the noted physiologist John Scott
Haldane, he began studying science as assistant to his father at the age of eight and later
received formal education in the classics at Eton College and at New College, Oxford
(M.A., 1914). After World War I he served as a fellow of New College and then taught at
the University of Cambridge (1922–32), the University of California, Berkeley (1932),
and the University of London (1933–57).

In the 1930s Haldane became a Marxist. He joined the British Communist Party
and assumed editorship of the party’s London paper, the Daily Worker. Later, he became
disillusioned with the official party line and with the rise of the controversial Soviet
biologist Trofim D. Lysenko. In 1957 Haldane moved to India, where he took citizenship
and headed the government Genetics and Biometry Laboratory in Orissa.

Haldane, R.A. Fisher, and Sewall Wright, in separate mathematical arguments

based on analyses of mutation rates, population size, patterns of reproduction, and other
factors, related Darwinian evolutionary theory and Gregor Mendel’s concepts of heredity.
Haldane also contributed to the theory of enzyme action and to studies in human
physiology. He possessed a combination of analytic powers, literary abilities, a wide
range of knowledge, and a force of personality that produced numerous discoveries in
several scientific fields and proved stimulating to an entire generation of research
workers.

Haldane’s major works include Daedalus (1924), Animal Biology (with British
evolutionist Julian Huxley, 1927), The Inequality of Man (1932), The Causes of
Evolution (1932), The Marxist Philosophy and the Sciences (1938), Science Advances
(1947), and The Biochemistry of Genetics (1954). Selected Genetic Papers of J.B.S.
Haldane, ed. by Krishna R. Dronamraju, was published in 1990.
OPARIN
Aleksandr Ivanovich Oparin was born on February 18, 1894 in Uglich, Russia and
died on April 21, 1980. Russian biochemist noted for his studies on the origin of life from
chemical matter. By drawing on the insights of chemistry, he extended the Darwinian
theory of evolution backward in time to explain how simple organic and inorganic
materials might have combined into complex organic compounds and how the latter
might have formed the primordial organism. When Oparin was nine, his family moved to
Moscow because there was no secondary school in their village. While majoring in plant
physiology at Moscow State University, Oparin was influenced by K.A. Timiryazev, a
Russian plant physiologist, who had known the English naturalist Charles Darwin. The
indirect effect of Darwin upon Oparin’s thinking can be found in many of the latter’s
writings.

In his postdoctoral days Oparin was influenced also by A.N. Bakh, a botanist.
Bakh left Russia at the time of the Revolution but later returned. Despite the financial
difficulties of the times, the Soviet government established a biochemical institute in his
honour in 1935 in Moscow; Oparin helped to found it and served as its director until his
death.

At a meeting of the Russian Botanical Society in the spring of 1922, Oparin first
introduced his concept of a primordial organism arising in a brew of already formed
organic compounds. He stated a number of premises that were not popular at the time.
For example, according to his hypothesis, the earliest organisms were heterotrophic; i.e.,
they obtained their nutrition ready-made from compounds that had already been formed
in variety and profusion by what are in the laboratory quite ordinary means. Thus, at that
early stage, these first organisms did not need to synthesize their own food materials in
the way that present-day plants do. Oparin also emphasized that a high degree of
structural and functional organization is characteristic of the living state, a point of view
that is in opposition to the idea that “life” is essentially molecular. He was also farsighted
in his observation that living organisms, as open systems, must receive energy and
materials from outside themselves; they cannot, therefore, be limited by the second law
of thermodynamics, which is applicable to closed systems in which energy is not
replenished.
MILLER
Stanley Miller was born on March 7, 1930 in Oakland, California and died on May
20, 2007 in National City, California. designed the first experiment to produce organic
molecules from some of the inorganic components of the Earth’s prebiotic atmosphere.
Miller’s procedure (which was co-designed by Harold Urey and is known as the Miller-
Urey experiment) contained three key elements: a heated pool of water meant to simulate
the primitive Earth’s ocean; an atmosphere of water vapour, methane, ammonia, and
molecular hydrogen; and storms of “lightning” in the form of continuous electric
discharges.

After one week, 10–15% of the system’s carbon was found in organic molecules
such as amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. Miller’s experiment was not only a
groundbreaking moment for research into the origin of life on Earth but also a
breakthrough that captured the popular imagination and gave rise to the term prebiotic
soup.

Miller received a B.S. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1951 and a
doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1954. After a one-year fellowship at the
California Institute of Technology, Miller moved to Columbia University, New York
City, for five years and then to the University of California, San Diego, where he
remained for the rest of his career. Miller became a member of the National Academy of
Sciences in 1973 and in 1983 was awarded the Oparin Medal by the International Society
for the Study of the Origin of Life.
UREY
Harold Clayton Urey was born on April 29, 1893 in Walkerton, Indiana and died
on Jan 5, 1981, La Jolla, California. American scientist awarded the Nobel Prize for
Chemistry in 1934 for his discovery of the heavy form of hydrogen known as deuterium.
He was a key figure in the development of the atomic bomb and made fundamental
contributions to a widely accepted theory of the origin of the Earth and other planets.
Urey was one of three children of Samuel Clayton Urey and Cora Rebecca Reinsehl. The
elder Urey, a schoolteacher and minister, died when the boy was six. His mother
remarried and had two daughters in that marriage.

After high school, Urey taught in rural public schools from 1911 to 1914, first in
Indiana and then in Montana. While teaching at a mining camp in Montana, Urey decided
to attend the University of Montana in Missoula, where he majored in zoology with
additional study in chemistry. After graduating in 1917, Urey worked as a chemist during
World War I, an experience that set his future in chemistry. After the war, he returned to
the University of Montana, where he taught chemistry for two years before beginning
graduate study at the University of California at Berkeley. Under the direction of Gilbert
N. Lewis, he received a doctorate for his dissertation on electron distribution in the
energy levels of the hydrogen atom and thermodynamic calculations on gaseous
molecules. Although the necessary molecular properties were not then available, Urey
developed good approximate values. His work led to accepted methods for calculating
thermodynamic properties from spectroscopic data. With an American-Scandinavian
Fellowship, Urey spent 1923–24 with the Danish physicist Niels Bohr at the Institute for
Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen. Afterward, Urey joined the faculty at Johns Hopkins
University in Baltimore, Md., where he emphasized the importance of quantum
mechanics for students of chemistry and directed his research toward the spectroscopic
study of molecules. With the American physicist Arthur E. Ruark, he published Atoms,
Molecules and Quanta (1930), an early discussion in English of the new field of quantum
mechanics. While visiting his mother in Seattle, Wash., in 1926, Urey met Frieda Daum,
a bacteriologist from Lawrence, Kan. They married and had four children.
FOX
Sidney Walter Fox was born on March 24, 1912 in Los Angeles and died on
August 10, 1988. He was a Los Angeles-born biochemist responsible for discoveries on
the origins of life. Fox explored the synthesis of amino acids from inorganic molecules,
the synthesis of proteinous amino acids and amino acid polymers called "proteinoids"
from inorganic molecules and thermal energy, and created what he thought was the
world's first protocell out of proteinoids and water. He called these globules
"microspheres". Fox believed in the process of abiogenesis where life spontaneously
organized itself from the colloquially known "primordial soup;" poolings of various
simple organic molecules that existed during the time before life on Earth. He also
suggested that his experiments possessed conditions that were similar to those of
primordial Earth. In his experiments, he demonstrated that it is possible to create protein-
like structures from inorganic molecules and thermal energy. Dr. Fox went on to create
microspheres that he said closely resembled bacterial cells and concluded that they could
be similar to the earliest forms of life or protocells.

Sidney Fox was the son of Jacob Fox, a wig-maker, and Louise Berman, a
Ukrainian immigrant. Fox married Raia Joffe Fox and they have three sons: Lawrence,
Ronald, and Thomas. All three of his sons became scientists. His family was Jewish.

Fox obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree from University of California, Los Angeles in
Chemistry. He went on to earn a Ph. D. from California Institute of Technology in 1940
and did his postdoctoral work at the Linus Pauling Laboratory where he grew close with
Linus Pauling.

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_W._Fox

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Harold-Urey

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Stanley-Lloyd-Miller

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Aleksandr-Oparin
https://www.britannica.com/biography/J-B-S-Haldane