Readers may remember Suzan Mazur’s interview with a senior NASA scientist: senior NASA origin of life scientist:
In a couple of e-mails to me in January 2013, Andrew Pohorille, the senior-most scientist at NASA working in the origin of life field, objected to my story, “The RNA World’s Last Hurrah?”, “The RNA World’s Last Hurrah?”, in which I interviewed Paul Davies’ collaborator at Arizona State University, physicist Sara Walker. …
Hey, we got you hooked? Then how be this, a followup:
Pohorille is now even less enthused about the RNA world since Princeton and said there were also fewer scientists currently pursuing that line of research. He also thinks the answer to origin of life is not about a thermodynamic factor — which he says smacks of creationism. And he adds that scientists have so far not found viruses in meteorites, i.e., no nucleic acid.
I mentioned the recent lukewarm New York Times story about origin of life research and Pohorille agreed not only with the Times assessment but with comments made earlier to me by biochemist Pier Luigi Luisi that we need all new “mindstorms,” because nothing much has happened since Miller-Urey yet scientists keep pursuing the same lines of investigation.
Pohorille, however, does think working with amino acids makes sense. … More.
Can a reader explain more re “the answer to origin of life is not about a thermodynamic factor — which Pohorille says smacks of creationism.” He is talking about what, exactly?
Suzan Mazur is the autho of The Origin of Life Circus, the best read since the clasic Seven Clues to the Origin of Life: A Scientific Detective Story
See also: A quick summary of origin of life issues
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