NASA finds proof that amino acid components in meteorites originate in space.
This is exciting news. NASA-funded researchers have evidence that some building blocks of DNA, the molecule that carries the genetic instructions for life, found in meteorites were likely created in space. The research gives support to the theory that a “kit” of ready-made parts created in space and delivered to Earth by meteorite and comet impacts assisted the origin of life. We may all be immigrants on Earth.
By Bill Steigerwald
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
NASA-funded researchers have evidence that some building blocks of DNA, the molecule that carries the genetic instructions for life, found in meteorites were likely created in space. The research gives support to the theory that a “kit” of ready-made parts created in space and delivered to Earth by meteorite and comet impacts assisted the origin of life.
“People have been discovering components of DNA in meteorites since the 1960’s, but researchers were unsure whether they were really created in space or if instead they came from contamination by terrestrial life,” said Dr. Michael Callahan of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. “For the first time, we have three lines of evidence that together give us confidence these DNA building blocks actually were created in space.” Callahan is lead author of a paper on the discovery appearing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
The discovery adds to a growing body of evidence that the chemistry inside asteroids and comets is capable of making building blocks of essential biological molecules.
For example, previously, these scientists at the Goddard Astrobiology Analytical Laboratory have found amino acids in samples of comet Wild 2 from NASA’s Stardust mission, and in various carbon-rich meteorites. Amino acids are used to make proteins, the workhorse molecules of life, used in everything from structures like hair to enzymes, the catalysts that speed up or regulate chemical reactions.
In the new work, the Goddard team ground up samples of twelve carbon-rich meteorites, nine of which were recovered from Antarctica. They extracted each sample with a solution of formic acid and ran them through a liquid chromatograph, an instrument that separates a mixture of compounds. They further analyzed the samples with a mass spectrometer, which helps determine the chemical structure of compounds.
The team found adenine and guanine, which are components of DNA called nucleobases, as well as hypoxanthine and xanthine. DNA resembles a spiral ladder; adenine and guanine connect with two other nucleobases to form the rungs of the ladder. They are part of the code that tells the cellular machinery which proteins to make. Hypoxanthine and xanthine are not found in DNA, but are used in other biological processes.
Also, in two of the meteorites, the team discovered for the first time trace amounts of three molecules related to nucleobases: purine, 2,6-diaminopurine, and 6,8-diaminopurine; the latter two almost never used in biology. These compounds have the same core molecule as nucleobases but with a structure added or removed.
It’s these nucleobase-related molecules, called nucleobase analogs, which provide the first piece of evidence that the compounds in the meteorites came from space and not terrestrial contamination. “You would not expect to see these nucleobase analogs if contamination from terrestrial life was the source, because they’re not used in biology, aside from one report of 2,6-diaminopurine occurring in a virus (cyanophage S-2L),” said Callahan. “However, if asteroids are behaving like chemical ‘factories’ cranking out prebiotic material, you would expect them to produce many variants of nucleobases, not just the biological ones, due to the wide variety of ingredients and conditions in each asteroid.”
The second piece of evidence involved research to further rule out the possibility of terrestrial contamination as a source of these molecules. The team also analyzed an eight-kilogram (17.64-pound) sample of ice from Antarctica, where most of the meteorites in the study were found, with the same methods used on the meteorites. The amounts of the two nucleobases, plus hypoxanthine and xanthine, found in the ice were much lower — parts per trillion — than in the meteorites, where they were generally present at several parts per billion. More significantly, none of the nucleobase analogs were detected in the ice sample. One of the meteorites with nucleobase analog molecules fell in Australia, and the team also analyzed a soil sample collected near the fall site. As with the ice sample, the soil sample had none of the nucleobase analog molecules present in the meteorite.
Thirdly, the team found these nucleobases — both the biological and non-biological ones — were produced in a completely non-biological reaction. “In the lab, an identical suite of nucleobases and nucleobase analogs were generated in non-biological chemical reactions containing hydrogen cyanide, ammonia, and water. This provides a plausible mechanism for their synthesis in the asteroid parent bodies, and supports the notion that they are extraterrestrial,” says Callahan.
“In fact, there seems to be a ‘goldilocks’ class of meteorite, the so-called CM2 meteorites, where conditions are just right to make more of these molecules,” adds Callahan.
The team includes Callahan and Drs. Jennifer C. Stern, Daniel P. Glavin, and Jason P. Dworkin of NASA Goddard’s Astrobiology Analytical Laboratory; Ms. Karen E. Smith and Dr. Christopher H. House of Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pa.; Dr. H. James Cleaves II of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, Washington, DC; and Dr. Josef Ruzicka of Thermo Fisher Scientific, Somerset, N.J. The research was funded by the NASA Astrobiology Institute, the Goddard Center for Astrobiology, the NASA Astrobiology: Exobiology and Evolutionary Biology Program, and the NASA Postdoctoral Program.
Related Link
› Related videos from NASA Goddard’s Scientific Visualization Studio
Theo Goodwin said @ur momisugly August 10, 2011 at 3:23 pm
“My criticism of Dawkins is that he is the most out-of-control Platonist since Plato. If you read Plato’s basic works, you learn that he had an incredible tendency to reify abstractions. For example, Plato argued that Heaven is real and causes events in human experience. In particular, he argued that learning is recollection of Heaven. That position implies that you learn because you have been in Heaven and have directly experienced what you are now recalling at the hand of the good teacher, Plato. Well, what is Heaven but where the aliens live?
Dawkins reifies DNA in the same way that Plato reified ideas and the World of Forms (ideas). Aristotle refused to do this and took the individual living thing as the fundamental posit of his biology (Plato had none) and his metaphysics. I do not find Platonism congenial.”
Well said; I could not agree more…
Hoser says:
August 10, 2011 at 11:04 pm
John B says:
August 10, 2011 at 3:33 pm
The bases are planar, there is no chirality. Double bonds take it out.
Good grief! Did some of you guys do anything useful today?
—————————–
Yes, you are right, planar molecules cannot be chiral. What I wrote applies to amino acids not to these nucleobases. A pity that incorrect subtitle got everyone off on the wrong foot. Probably too late to bother changing it now.
My bad!
Theo Goodwin says:
August 10, 2011 at 4:54 pm
John B says:
August 10, 2011 at 3:05 pm
“I have seen before this attempt to draw parallels between AGW and creationism, and thus paint AGW as anti-science. However, just scanning this thread one can see that it is among the so-called “skeptics” that creationist ideas are common, if not overwhelming.”
Well, what a sweet little bigot you are. You just are not going to miss an opportunity to bash people for talking about religion, are you? You are going to use every tool in your bigoted little arsenal to stop talk of religion, aren’t you? What would you do if you had all the power you need? Would you outlaw religious expression? Would you press criminal charges against the religious? If you are not a hardcore Marxist, if you do not believe in Mao’s New Socialist Man, then you are really missing a bet. Their views on religion are remarkably similar to yours.
———————————
I’m not bashing anyone. Just pointing out an apparrent correlation. I never even mentioned religion (most of the religious folk I know would not consider creationism to be a necessary part of religion).
Jeff Alberts,
You write:I disagree, Ron. If it seems like natural processes aren’t up to the task, then it means we don’t know enough about them, or there are some we haven’t discovered.
This is a statement of faith in atheism. I have quoted agnostic scientists like Robert Jastrow and many others who admit we know enough about the physics and natural processes to know they are not up to the task. This is the basis of the Intelligent Design argument. To continue to assert some other unseen force of nature must be at work is a statement of faith in atheism.
We know from experimentation and observation that rain occurs not because we’ve satisfied the gods, but due to natural processes.
Yes, and the point is?
Dave Springer says:
August 10, 2011 at 8:23 am
Is there some specific reason my first comment:
Dave Springer says:
Your comment is awaiting moderation.
August 10, 2011 at 5:23 am
has been sitting in moderation for 3 hours while 25 comments after it have been approved?
REPLY: Yes, sleep. And when I wake up and log on the comment list in WP is from newest to oldest. Then I had to take a break to go to loo and get coffee before resuming. Any other complaints? – Anthony
REPLY to REPLY: Thanks for taking the time to reply. I know how much work it is as I used to do it myself. It’s just that when a comment gets buried that deep awaiting moderation approval it’s far less likely that anyone will read it. Youngest to oldest approval order is essentially like having a line of people waiting to get into a crowded theater and letting the people at the back of the line get in first.
NASA finds proof that amino acid components in meteorites originate in space
———–
Still wrong. I think what you are looking for is
NASA finds proof that amino acid precursors in meteorites originate in space
RandomReal[] says:
August 11, 2011 at 12:54 am
Your post is very interesting. Thanks for the update. I have no trouble with the science that you describe. I hope that we learn some good things from it. However, you too seem to suffer just a bit from Dawkins’ Platonism, his tendency to reify abstractions, as in the following:
“This is molecular archaeology. With the development of DNA sequence technology and other biochemical and biophysical techniques, we can trace our genetic history back a long way.”
Actually, we cannot. The human genome does not contain a record of human evolution. For it to contain such a record, it would be necessary that each step in human evolution is caused by a unique change in the evolving species’ genetic structure. No biologist has ever claimed that only changes in genetic structure drive evolution.
The temptation to reify the genome and make it the one causal force in evolutionary history is exactly what drives Dawkins’ account of DNA. Scientifically, this is backwards, as Aristotle explained to his teacher Plato. Biology is about individual living organisms and to treat them as vehicles for “that which is really living” is to make the abstraction, the genome, more real as a cause than the organism that carries it. The actual work of science supports my point. The use of computers to map the human genome is quite an accomplishment but the real work in understanding genes as causes is done by the scientists who are studying gene expression. In other words, the real work is still done with arms immersed in vats of chemicals and not with fingers on the keyboards. Here is a mnemonic to help one remember this: Crick and Watson. Crick was the mathematician who made the brilliant leap to the Double Helix, Watson lived with his arms in vats of chemicals. Crick did the math and Watson did everything else.
At 11:53 PM on 10 August, <b.Eric Anderson writes of the quoted paragraphs drawn from Ronald Bailey’s “Attack of the Super-Intelligent Purple Space Squid Creators” (Reason magazine, 15 July 2008):
The “interesting quotes,” of course, do not constitute the whole article, to which I have courteously – and repeatedly – linked.
Mr. Anderson, would you care to make some kind of reasoned argument detailing just why anyone reading here should accept your opinion that Mr. Bailey’s characterization of “the design argument” shows that he “doesn’t know what he is talking about“?
Or is your style of discourse completely Pythonesque?
Hoser says:
August 10, 2011 at 9:44 am
Dave Springer says:
August 10, 2011 at 8:18 am
“There are things we don’t understand yet. Just because we don’t have all the answers, it doesn’t follow that there must be a supernatural cause.”
I have no objection to that so long as we understand that what something today we describe as supernatural may not be supernatural tomorrow. We don’t know everything that exists in nature quite yet. Maybe “God” is a natural part of the universe. It certainly appears, at the least, that intelligent agents are a natural part of the universe. You and I are intelligent agents. We exist as a part of the universe. The scientific consensus is that we came to exist through the natural interplay of physical law and probability.
What law or probability prohibits intelligent agency vastly older and more capable than ourselves in the universe? The answer is that nothing prohibits it. So if you observe something that exhibits the hallmarks of intelligent agency it’s not at all unreasonable to presume it is indeed the result of intelligent agency since we already know that intelligent agency exists in at least one instance as proof that it happens.
You can’t have your cake and eat it too.
Maybe today’s physics is not up to the task, just as the physics of 1711 could not have described electromagnetism (do we fully understand that yet?), but how about tomorrow’s physics? The phrase “not up to the task” is just another variant on the old Argument from Ignorance. As I asked earlier, what is it about “We don’t know” that discomfits so many?
I don’t think confidence in, or hope for, scientific progress is the same thing as “faith in atheism.” The Scientific Method is the best tool we have for investigating the natural world. Are there other kinds of reality, and other sources of knowledge about them? Who knows? But the question of the origin of life is, at bottom, a question about the natural world. To introduce a Designer is just to throw a deus ex machina into the story, short-circuiting the inquiry. It’s cheating.
/Mr Lynn
At 8:53 PM on 10 August, Ron Cram takes issue with some of the content of a brief article written for the lay audience by Dr. Jeff Glassman in 2007, titled “Conjecture, Hypothesis, Theory, Law: The Basis of Rational Argument,” asserting his contention that Dr. Glassman: “…is not familiar with intelligent design,” having stated in the cited article that:
Dr. Glassman then lists as the candidates for consideration in this category:
Mr. Cram continues:
Far be it from me to defend Dr. Glassman’s contentions, briefly stated in the cited article. As he has proven repeatedly in other online fora (chiefly Dr. Curry’s Climate Etc. Web log), he does just fine all by himself, and I suggest to Mr. Cram that he take this non-issue up with Dr Glassman directly. His own Web log is the Rocket Scientist’s Journal.”
What I will observe here and now is that Mr. Cram’s leap-of-faith assertion “that intelligent design is very much aligned with Big Bang cosmology” is wholly unsupported and therefore unacceptable. There is, in point of fact, nothing of “intelligent design” that is “grounded in science” in any way whatsoever.
Like the AGW conjecture, the non-scientific assertions of “intelligent design” proponents have perpetrated “Cargo Cult Science” clumsily to attach the seeming of scientific validity to a premise that has nothing to do with the sciences.
Science fiction, perhaps. Ever read James Hogan’s novel Code of the Life-Maker (2002), Mr. Cram?
Anent your “Big Bang” assertion, Mr. Cram, please expatiate – with supporting references, if possible – or make your proclamation of faith in a virtual venue where the scientific method is not valued.
John B says:
August 11, 2011 at 2:16 am
“Yes, you are right, planar molecules cannot be chiral. What I wrote applies to amino acids not to these nucleobases. A pity that incorrect subtitle got everyone off on the wrong foot. Probably too late to bother changing it now. My bad!”
You were right the first time.
http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Training/Tutorials/science/structurecheck/tutorial_structurecheck-html/node3.html
Nucleic acids in DNA are indeed chiral and homochirality is essential to complimentary pair bonding in the DNA double-helix.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0014579386800369
Well Jeff, I think it would be fair to assume that you are as satisfied as I am by the mere fact that there is rain. The difference between believers and non-believers is that the former are thankful for rain no matter why it happens because it brings life; the latter don’t seem to be able to make that connection or have any reason to be thankful at all.
So I ask to myself questions such as, where did those ‘natural processes’ come from or why does water have such unique properties? To me it seems that there’s scientifically too much perfection in our universe to be explained without God. The further we delve into science – the more it seems to reveal that confirms my belief.
Amino Acids in Meteorites says:
August 10, 2011 at 8:26 pm
TMJ says:
August 10, 2011 at 1:23 am
I can’t wait to see what Amino Acids in Meteorites has to say about this 🙂
LOL!
What do I have to say? Well, it’s about time NASA catches up with the rest of the science world that has known about this for years. Now if they can just get caught up with the real science of global warming……..
How about a name change to “Nucleic Acids in Meteorites”? (It wouldn’t be your first name-change if I remember rightly 🙂
Jeff Alberts says:
August 10, 2011 at 9:17 pm
“By that logic, there can’t have been a “life-giver”, for two reasons, 1) who gave that life-giver life? 2) the life-giver can’t make like from non-life (e.g. a man from clay, or out of thin air).”
Oh my! The “who designed the designer” argument. Classic.
While I’m trying to figure out who designed the designer why don’t you work on trying to figure out who or what provided the material for materialism.
Infinite regressions such as these invariably run into a brick wall called “The Big Bang”. Usually when you run into infinities in mathematics or physics it is labeled “undefined” where the usual first example we learn is division by zero. There’s a rational reason for the theologic belief that God is infinite. One might say that 1/0 = GOD. Infinities are irrational yet they appear to exist and where we find them we find the end what modern physics can explain.
Eminent living theoretical physicists say:
In the early 1990′s, a creeping realization swept through the theoretical physics community that the probability for the universe to even exist was vanishingly small. Indeed, the only “theory” around that seemed able to explain the universe’s existence was Intelligent Design. This was not something physicists and cosmologists liked to talk about.
~Carl Frederick, 2008
Which Way Out?
There are four possible solutions to the problem, schemas if you will.
1) God tuned the parameters for our benefit.
2) There are a very large number of universes each of which has random parameters.
3) There is a “unique mathematically consistent theory of the whole universe”.
4) The parameters evolve in time – in the Darwinian sense.
A good number of very intelligent people have argued for schemas two, three, and four above. At the moment there is nothing resembling a consensus among physicists.
~Lee Smolin
A good number of very intelligent people have argued for schema one as well, Lee. Maybe you don’t run into them in your atheist circle of friends but surely an accomplished physicist such as yourself must have stumbled upon some of them in the history of science and philosophy. People like Isaac Newton and Albert Enstein for instance.
There is a lot of discussion on the possibility, of nucleobases somehow forming amino acids, somehow rubbing and forming RNA, then assembling to DNA. This then miraculously forming a living organism.
However, lets consider a simple situation, where all the amino acids, RNA, and DNA is already present in the exact proportions and alignments required. This would be the case in a simple organism such as a living bacteria or amoebae. Now starve the creature until dead or kill it via the least destructive means. Almost all proteins, acids, DNA, RNA, nucleus, H2O is in place correctly. Now re-animate this dead organism.
We cannot! We just don’t have any way to express the life force. Resuscitation is possible up until death, but that is all. Beyond deaths door we cannot travel.
Assembling complex building blocks, into scaffold, seems to have little or nothing to do with the life force, other than allowing it to act in this particularized universe.
Why speculate on the origins of organic building blocks, when we cannot re create life from the intact or repaired scaffolding. Seems like we are in the wrong ball park entirely. Only life begets life, and NO ONE knows why. GK
George M says:
August 10, 2011 at 6:15 pm
“The whole point of believing in God is that God exists outside the universe. The Big Bang theory is one way of concieving how the Universe started. But any theory in this universe can’t prove anything about what exists or doesn’t exist outside the universe(one of Goedal’s theorems).”
Yes but the observable universe is bounded by the observer. As our ability to observe grows so may the universe to what we consider to be outside the observable universe today may be inside the observable universe tomorrow.
I’m sure alchemists 500 years ago thought they knew it all as well. I didn’t mention an unseen force, I mentioned processes we don’t understand, or don’t fully understand, or haven’t discovered yet. If you want to call that an unseen force, I can’t stop you.
The point is that the more we learn, the less we have to rely on the supernatural.
“Supernatual” has a really negative and undeserved connotation with respect to science.
There are two realms of science – experimental and theoretical. Experimental science deals with what we are able to observe. Our ability to observe grows daily at both the smallest and largest scales. Theoretical science is about inferences from what we observe.
For instance, The Standard Model neither predicts nor explains so-called “dark energy”. We can’t observe it. We infer it from what we can observe, in particular the observation that the rate of expansion of the universe is itself accelerating. Indeed, we also infer from the observed acceleration that dark energy comprises some 70% of the stuff that makes up the universe. Right now dark energy appears to meet the definition of “supernatural”.
The notion that science must be divorced from the supernatural is nonsense. Science is rife with inferences to things which cannot be observed at present. A creator is one of those things that cannot be observed, at least not yet, but it doesn’t follow that science cannot infer the existence of a creator by the nature of what can be observed. This is what intelligent design is all about. Unfortunately it has a bad rap too because so many people have gone beyond what can be inferred (intelligent agency) from observation to what cannot be inferred (the agency in question is the God of Abraham, for instance). Intelligent Design does not infer a personal God. It infers intelligent agency and no more. It does that through observation of what law and chance can reasonably accomplish given the opportunity available in a finite universe. Law and chance can accomplish anything physically possible in an infinite universe but to the best of our knowledge the universe is finite in both age and constituent matter/energy so we do the probability analysis within those bounds.
Science should be and rightly is guarded about this lest the quest for explanations be abandoned to hasty suppositions of supernatural causes that operate outside of what The Standard Model can explain. The Standard Model is incomplete. We already know that. It lacks a theory of quantum gravity for one thing and it collapses into undefined territory upon encountering infinities such as the central mass in a black hole where density becomes infinitely large and volume infinitely small.
Jeff Alberts says from “Yes, and the point is?”:
“The point is that the more we learn, the less we have to rely on the supernatural.”
Oh really? That’s interesting considering we all die eventually which forces us, or many of us to consider the supernatural. Science has allowed us to live longer (not too much) sometimes at the expense of not being able to really function as a human (brain dead so to speak), but can it ever cure death? Is death natural? Science may say so, but our minds and wills don’t want to accept that, so what is the point? Even if science proves evolution by duplicating it the masses will say, “what is the point?” and very possibly go back to religion as an “opium of the masses” just to give themselves a point, which makes me wonder if there is a point to begin with. Tell me how many times in the face of uncontrollable events such as hurricanes and tornadoes do someone pray (to whomever). Can scientific knowledge save you in this instance? Maybe someday, but I really don’t think we will control nature (so far we affect it but that is different), and if we could to what adverse affect? Laws are in place. At the end of the day we still must face life and death and science isn’t life, just a way to observe it, sometime explain it, and hopefully affect it, but we still must live it. If life doesn’t really have a point beyond what society makes of it, then we end up in that whole “everything is relative” argument which really isn’t true as we all make conclusions and decisions to the contrary and are still driven to the supernatural to support it, whether it is believing in a god or a lack of god (evolution isn’t fact, not yet so it still delves way to far into the philosophical realm).
RandomReal[] – Your 12:54 am post was fascinating, informative, and very professionally crafted. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it, and it is bookmarked it for future reference.
Thank you!
Tucci78 @5:22 a.m.
Thanks for the link to The Argument Clinic – long one of my favorites.
Bailey’s “article” is a mess. His entire sarcastic hatchet job assumes that ID (which he, in typical strawman fashion, pejoratively labels “intelligent design creationism,” even while acknowledging that the leading ID proponents do not view ID as a form of creationism) is focused on the identity of the designer. It is not. Leading ID proponents have from the start been, and continue to be, very clear that ID addresses a very limited question: is it possible to reliably detect the artifacts of intelligent activity in physical systems. The whole business about who the designer is or designers are, or where the designer came from, is not part of the argument from design.
You may be right, though. Perhaps Bailey does understand the design argument. In which case instead of being mistaken he is being purposely deceptive.
Dave Springer,
Very logical analysis and concepts. The one that cannot be resolved without intelligent design is why everything is so perfect for the existence of our universe, from the atomic scale and energy levels, to the fine structure “constant”, to the expansion rate of the universe. Change any of these values, even slightly, and there would be nothing here, assuming that the rules are the same everywhere. Big assumption! I am sure someone will point out that in a sufficient number of universes probabilities alone would create one that is like ours but then we are back to where did it come from if it has not always been here?
. Remember also that the big bang is a theory. The universe could be infinite in age if not also in size and simply expand and contract, or be a part of a multiverse which collides with other universes creating the equivalent of a big bang. Many possibilities.
As to a personal God, that is an Item of faith, which I happen to believe is the way He wants it.
Dave Springer says:
August 11, 2011 at 6:00 am
John B says:
August 11, 2011 at 2:16 am
“Yes, you are right, planar molecules cannot be chiral. What I wrote applies to amino acids not to these nucleobases. A pity that incorrect subtitle got everyone off on the wrong foot. Probably too late to bother changing it now. My bad!”
You were right the first time. …
—————–
No, I think I was wrong. The chiral centres in DNA are in the sugar part of the nucleoside/nucleotide. The molecules found here were bases only, which are planar hence no chiral centres.
http://www.blc.arizona.edu/molecular_graphics/dna_structure/dna_tutorial.html
As an aside, this whole “non-life cannot beget life” / “life can only come from life” argument is being contorted dreadfully. It comes originally from Pasteur, who did a neat experiment to show that flies on rotting meat came from flies laying eggs, and that if the meat were kept sealed from the atmosphere, no flies would appear. He was showing that life *as we know it* could only come from reproduction, not just appear “by magic”. It did not have anything to say about how life got started millions or billions of years ago. What he showed is that complex life (like flies) was not “spontaneously generated”. Which, of course, modern evolutionary scientists would toally agree with.