real life wrote:Actually it was Dr Shapiro again:
Robert Shapiro, Professor Emeritus and Senior Research Scientist in the Department of Chemistry at New York University wrote: I was originally an organic chemist ?- perhaps the only one of the six of us ?- and worked in the field of organic synthesis, and then I got my PhD, which was in 1959, believe it or not. I had realized that there was a lot of action in Cambridge, England, which was basically organic chemistry, and I went to work with a gentleman named Alexander Todd, promoted eventually to Lord Todd, and I published one paper with him, which was the closest I ever got to the Lord. I then spent decades running a laboratory in DNA chemistry, and so many people were working on DNA synthesis ?- which has been put to good use as you can see ?- that I decided to do the opposite, and studied the chemistry of how DNA could be kicked to Hell by environmental agents. Among the most lethal environmental agents I discovered for DNA ?- pardon me, I'm about to imbibe it ?- was water. Because water does nasty things to DNA. For example, there's a process I heard you mention called DNA animation, where it kicks off part of the coding part of DNA from the units ?- that was discovered in my laboratory.
Another thing water does is help the information units fall off of DNA, which is called depurination and ought to apply only one of the subunits ?- but works under physiological conditions for the pyrimidines as well, and I helped elaborate the mechanism by which water helped destroy that part of DNA structure. I realized what a fragile and vulnerable molecule it was, even if was the center of Earth life. After water, or competing with water, the other thing that really does damage to DNA, that is very much the center of hot research now ?- again I can't tell you to stop using it ?- is oxygen. If you don't drink the water and don't breathe the air, as Tom Lehrer used to say, and you should be perfectly safe.
http://www.edge.org/documents/life/shapiro_index.html
One of your links even says 'If you want to save the DNA, then transfer it out of the water and into alcohol.'
hmmm wonder why it says this?
Yes, real life, what does water do? Oh.. it evaporates if the mineral isn't immersed in water. Periodic movement of water across can capture and move chemicals to another container (a microscopic pore on the surface of the mineral) before the water evaporates leaving the chemicals behind in the new container. You will probably try to argue that the water will wash out all the chemicals but anyone that has ever immersed a stone in water knows you don't wash off all the dirt doing that. You can't even do it by running water over it for a period of time. And we are not talking visible dirt on a rock, we are talking chemicals in a pore that is small enough that the water running across it can't completely enter the pore because of surface tension. The water can only take the top layers of the chemicals from the pore.
So, we have a container on a mineral surface that has a chemical process that can be classified as life. Water periodically can capture part of this chemical process and move it to other containers. The transfer is quite easy and simple. It only requires something that happens often on earth. Water flows across a mineral.
Lets assume the chances are 1 in a million of the chemical process moving to another pore each time water flows across the mineral face. With a million pores that means the first time, you get 2 life forms, The next time you get 4, and so on until you fill enough of the pores that it can't double.
Now we only need to add amino acids to our process. If a container starts to picks up amino acids that combine to form longer chains then those RNA strands could be transferred the next time the chemical process is transferred. We now have millions of pores that each time water flows can fill with the chemical process and RNA or can add RNA to an existing chemical process. But what if the RNA in one of those pores puts together the right chain to make DNA? The DNA doesn't have to be replicator for a life form because it is protected in a container and it won't be destroyed.
If water happens to transfer the DNA from one pore to another what happens? The DNA could mutate. Oh.. wait. What did Shapiro say? Water can cause DNA to do just that because it deteriorates the end. What happens when it then adds on to the end again. It changes. Now we have created a system that is not only possible to mutate DNA but is in fact likely to do just that.
Who needs to believe in miracles real life? Only you it seems.
