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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 (Alice Orgel M.D.)
lived 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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