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Notes on Leslie Orgel
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- Dr. Leslie Orgel died Oct. 27 2007 in San Diego.
- Dr. Leslie Orgel and wife Alice live in La Jolla.
Rug Collector since the late 1960s
- "Leslie Orgel, An Obsession for Bags"
XI/1/44-45
- Contributor to Benardout, R. ed. WOVEN STARS.
1996, Catalogue of an exhibition at the 3rd
American Conference on Oriental Carpets
- Noted for the bon mot "Evolution is cleverer
than you are". that has come to be known as
Orgel's Second Rule.
- It is widely reported that Orgel has written that
life on earth came from space aliens. I always
saw this as a copout since by obscuring the
uncaused first cause it covered up the giant flaw
in his paradigm. It is tempting to write Orgel
off as a nutter what with his space aliens,
contributions to Turkotek and his association
with Raymond Benardout but I don;t preferring o
respect him for his contributions rather than
focusing on the questionable parts.
- National Academy of Sciences
- Fellow of the Royal Society of London
- American Academy of Arts and Sciences
- Leslie Eleazer Orgel was born in London, England,
on January 12, 1927. He received his B.A. in
chemistry with first class honors from Oxford
university in 1949. In 1950 he was elected a
Fellow of Magdalen College and in 1951 was
awarded his Ph.D in chemistry at Oxford.
Orgel started his career as a theoretical
inorganic chemist and continued his studies in
this field at Oxford, the California Institute of
Technology and the University of Chicago. In 1955
he joined the chemistry department at Cambridge
university. There he did work in transition metal
chemistry, published articles and wrote a
textbook entitled TRANSITION METAL CHEMISTRY:
LIGAND FIELD THEORY (1960).
In 1964 Orgel was appointed Senior Fellow and
Research Professor at the Salk Institute for
Biological Studies, where he directs the Chemical
Evolution Laboratory. He is also an adjunct
professor in the Department of Chemistry and
Biochemistry at the University of California, San
Diego, and he is one of five principal
investigators in the NASA-sponsored NSCORT
program in exobiology. Orgel also participated in
NASA's Viking Mars Lander Program as a member of
the Molecular Analysis Team that designed the gas
chromatography mass spectrometer instrument.
Orgel's work in the Chemical Evolution Laboratory
is in nucleotide chemistry and is mainly
concerned with non-enzymatic polymerization
reactions that depend on the formation of
double-helical complexes between a preformed
polynucleotide template and one or more
complementary mononucleotide or polynucleotide
substrates. In the context of chemical evolution,
selected templates are employed to facilitate
synthesis of complementary RNA sequences. In
other work, oligonucleotide sequences are used to
direct reactive molecules (warheads) to a
complementary target DNA, so as to cleave a
crosslink to the target at a predetermined
position. Methods for crosslinking transcription
factors irreversibly to their DNA recognition
sequences are also being developed. His
NASA-sponsored research focuses on the catalysis
of nucleic acid replication by mineral surfaces.
Orgel wrote THE ORIGINS OF LIFE: MOLECULES AND
NATURAL SELECTION (1970) and co-authored, with
Stanley Miller, THE ORIGINS OF LIFE ON THE EARTH
(1974). He has published over three hundred
articles in his research areas. Orgel's
contributions have been recognized throughout his
career. In Britain he was awarded the Harrison
Prize in 1957 for his work in inorganic chemistry
and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in
1962. In the United States he received a
Guggenheim Fellowship in 1971, the Evans Award
from Ohio State University in 1975, and the H.C.
Urey Medal from the International Society for the
Study of the Origin of Life. He was elected a
member of the National Academy of Sciences in
1990. Leslie
Orgel Papers: Background
Leslie E. Orgel, The Origins of Life:
Molecules and Natural Selection
Hardcover: 237 pages
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons; (March 1973)
Leslie E. Orgel: An Introduction to
Transition-Metal Chemistry
The Ligand Field Theory.
Publisher: Methuen, 1966
Salk Institute
Leslie E. Orgel
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Leslie Orgel, Biochemist Who Studied
Origins of Life, Dies at 80
By JEREMY
PEARCE Published: November 5, 2007
Leslie E. Orgel, a biochemist whose studies of
early life on primitive Earth
helped lead to the formation of a now widely
accepted theory about the development of DNA,
died Oct. 27 in San Diego. He was 80.
Dr. Orgel had also advanced a novel idea about
life’s possible arrival from outer space.
The cause was pancreatic cancer, said a
spokesman for the Salk Institute for Biological
Studies in San Diego, where Dr. Orgel had been on
the faculty since 1964.
Dr. Orgel and others began to pose seminal
questions about DNA’s biochemical origins in
the 1960s, as the molecular structure of DNA, or
deoxyribonucleic acid, was being unraveled and
its role as a storehouse of genetic instructions
was becoming more widely understood. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/05/us/05orgel.html
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For Further Reading:
Thanks and best wishes,
J. Barry O'Connell Jr.
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