James Tour
Transcript of oral statement made by James M. Tour. He is an American synthetic organic chemist, specializing in nanotechnology. Tour is the T. T. and W. F. Chao Professor of Chemistry, Professor of Materials Science and NanoEngineering, and Professor of Computer Science at Rice University in Houston, Texas, United States.
I'm a synthetic organic chemist. Origin of life is purely synthetic organic chemistry. There's no way around it. I am perfectly situated to be commenting on this - to be critiquing the origin of life. Research it is a biological, it is before biology takes over. This is purely synthetic organic chemistry and making
these compounds is very simple. Four classes of compounds you have to make from what's available on a presumed prebiotic earth and so the chemistry is not hard for synthetic organic chemists to follow. And any trained synthetic organic chemist can follow me on this, and I've never seen a synthetic organic chemist disagree with me on this. In fact the people that might disagree with me
are biologists because they've never made anything. The only thing they may have made is they buy a kit and they make it which is made by chemists but they've never made anything ex nihilo. And so it's the synthetic chemist that can critique origin of life research better than anyone else. So go ahead ask your synthetic chemist friends to listen to what I have to say. If they have anywhere a master's degree or beyond in synthetic organic chemistry have them critique what I say.
We do not know how to build even a simple bacterium. The simplest bacterium with its 256 protein coding genes we have no idea how to build it. Frst of all we don't know how to build the molecules, the four classes of molecules. that are needed for it. We don't know how to, even if we had those four classes of molecules assemble them even into a simplest of bacterium. We don't know how to do that. One can do that with the technologies we have today, we can make technologies but we can't even make the simplest bacterium. Anybody who would say something contrary does not know what they are talking about. Show me the demonstration. Nobody has ever done it and it's not because of lack of effort. It's not because of lack of will. First of all they haven't been able to get the molecules to do this and if they could make the molecules. even if we were to give them the molecules they wouldn't
have the information. There would be no inherent information in the DNA but even if we gave them the DNA in the structure that they wanted they wouldn't know how to put all the components together
because of the sophistication within a cell. The interactons, meaning that the interacting connectivity between the molecules that Vander Waals interactions all of these have to be in the right place and in the right order for a cell to function. We don't even know how to define life let alone knowing how to
spark it to begin.
When one looks at a typical textbook one will see some prehistoric pond and molecules and those molecules coming together and forming a cell and those cells coming together and some slithering creature coming out of this pond - that is fallacious. There is no truth in that. We don't even know how to make the molecules. We are lost on how to do this. We can't even make the basic building blocks but even if we could, even if we could from biological from prebiotic type environment to make these
with all the intellect that we put into this. Even if we could make them we have no idea how to aasemble them. You say, well we can make the liposome. the cell membrane. We cannot - there's over 40,000 - over 40,000 lipids have been identified in cell membranes. You want to take some simple ones, it's not just individual lipid membranes, you have to have the inside and the outside of the membrane have to be different, you have to have this huge array of proteins that transmembrane proteins and you have to have carbohydrates on the surface as identifiers even in the simplest bacterium, We have no idea how to put the structure together. It's not there so not only do we not know how to make the basic components we do not know how to build the structure even if we were
given the basic components so that the Gedankenexperiment (though experiment) is this even if I
gave you all the components, even if I gave you all the amino acids, all the protein, all the protein structures from those amino acids that you wanted, all the lipids in the purity that you wanted, the DNA the RNA , even in the sequence that you wanted - so I'm even giving you the code and all the
nucleic acids - can you now assemble a cell here in your individual laboratories. Not in a in a prebiotic cesspool but in your nice laboratory. And the answer is a resounding no and if anybody claims otherwise they do not know this area.
How widespread is the misunderstanding over the origin of life?
This is how far the misunderstanding has gone. Even science professors, even biology professors think that there is a near building of life. That we understand all the ways to build life. We do not. Not only have none of the molecules been made ab initio (from the beginning) under prebiotic like conditions to make the homochiral molecules that are made. Remember we need four classes of molecules: we need the nucleic acids and then the homochiral systems for the amino acids which then need to be built up into protein structures, we need the carbohydrates which have to be built up into the polycarbohydrate structures, and then we need the lipids which also are chiral. All of these we need in houmochiral form. We don't know how to do this in any prebiotic type scenario at all. These have not been made and then to assemble these into a cell - it's never been done so there's a gross misunderstanding and this misunderstanding has come because of the projections of those who work in the area of origin of life. They do one little thing and then they extrapolate it and then they work with the press to ramp it up even more. They project as if they really know it and so the layperson reads this and says: ah you see scientists understand. And then it's not just a layperson, scientists think that other scientists understand all of this but they do not. There's a great negative outcome of this beyond just leading the general public astray. What happens ultimately is you end up with a hundred million people in the United States that [as a result of the misrepresentation] no longer believe this and then you have the scientific elite saying why is there a hundred million people that don't buy into this. And that distrust will go beyond just that particular topic. It will extend into other topics and so it yields a distrust of science.
Some people argue that since there's been hundreds of millions of years available the probability that there's the chance that these things could happen in hundreds of millions of years. But that's not true. Time actually can be an enemy when it comes to organic synthesis. Prebiotic synthesis is before
biology so one has to make chemicals - many of the chemicals that need to be made for life are kinetic products, meaning that they're not the most thermodynamically stable form. For example carbohydrates which is the main class of compounds that are the units that hook together DNA. These are the units that have identifying aspects on cell structure; these are the units that the cell is
going to need for the energy of life. Carbohydrates are kinetic products meaning that if they should form they would decompose. They decompose over time and relatively short amounts of time. They decompose by the very reactions that make them unless somebody is there to pull them out to fish them out to stop the process and put them in a bottle under inert conditions in a freezer. And not just one there's, many many different types you have to do this [else] they end up going through a process of what's referred to as carmelization. Meaning that they polymerize the very aldol reactions that were used to make them. Just continue and you get polyaldose - poly condensation reactions and they caramelize, or they undergo with formaldehyde which is a presumed prebiotic chemical. They undergo rapid Cannizzaro reactions so the aldehyde is oxidized to two formic acids and this nice carbohydrate that you made has just been reduced. So the so the aldehyde that from the carbohydrate has gone back to an alcohol. So there's competing reactions so time does not solve the issue.
The other problem is if you had 400 million years to get to a certain point in a synthesis of a particular class of compounds. Now you run out of material even when you've optimized processes and you have got to go back to the beginning. Well, say it took you 400 million years to get to a certain point
on a synthesis - now you have to go back and make more. But how do you go back and make more because nature never kept a laboratory notebook, and doesn't know how to go back. So even if it could make more it doesn't know how to, so it's got to start all over again. But it doesn't know how
to start over again, doesn't know why to start over again because this doesn't know what it's going toward.
People have been trying for a long time. If we just take Miller-Urey as the first example where Miller and Urey took some basic chemicals that are presumed on a prebiotic earth. Hydrogen cyanide,
formaldehyde and CO2 and they put those across a high voltage simulating lightning you can get some racemic amino acids out of those. But those racemic amino acids we're receiving was in 1952. That was 2/3 of a century ago what has happened in 2/3 of a century since Miller Urey. In other
fields we've had human spaceflight, we've had satellite connectivity, we have the internet we have the entire Silicon era of microchips, and we have computer technology we have all of this in the same 66 years 2/3 of a century.
We are still exactly where Miller and Urey were. We make a barrage of stereo scrambled chemicals nowhere close to even knowing how to make them and hook them together. They got to get hooked together in the proper order. We are clueless on this. Clueless because time doesn't solve this. Even with all our ingenuity time is not going to solve the problem. You let these chemicals that have been made sit around even for months, and you can look even in the origin of life researchers themselves - when they've let these go for weeks they show the degradation of these in a period of weeks. Weeks is twinkling of an eye when it comes to prebiotic timescales the chemicals decompose in the environment. For the chemicals an environment rich in ammonia is going to turn carbon eels into amines. This is going to cause further destruction. The ammonia environment and cell itself is quite basic [alkali] so you're going to have extended aldol reactions coming on. So to think that the molecules could be made and sit there waiting for other molecules to come. It doesn't happen. Organic chemistry doesn't work that way. Any student that is lazy enough to setup reactions and like to go home for the weekend without working them up pays the price for that with a depressed yield. Generally as soon as the reactions are done or as soon as what you want is the optimized yield you have to stop that reaction and get it away from the starting materials or else what happens - it goes on to polymerize product. Especially when you're making kinetic products which is not the thermodynamically most stable product. Which is exactly what you get in many of the chemicals that are needed for life. So time is actually the enemy.
There have been many people that have tried in origin of life research to make the chemical building blocks for life. The vast majority of the chemical building blocks are chiral, which means that they have a non-superimposable mirror images. A mirror image just like our hands - the left hand and the right hand are non-superimposable mirror images. There are mirror images but they can't be superimposed and that's why a left-handed glove doesn't fit on the right hand. The vast majority of biological molecules are handed like that and to make them is difficult . We know how to do that in synthetic chemistry. It's never easy using prebiotic environment and it's never been successful. Some have said this could happen on a chiral crystal . One can get small enhancements but not nearly what you need and it's never been demonstrated even with all the intellect that people have put behind trying to do this with chiral crystals, and chiral layered environments, and chiral clay environments. The chemicals that are needed for life are more than just carbon and water.
The structures that one needs for the amino acids the amino acids then have to hook together to form proteins. It's not easy to get amino acids to hook together. One can get very small amounts if you just add a catalyst to it but the yields are extremely low. There are many activation steps that are needed to get the efficiently we find in nature in biology. Once you have life this is all done with nature's little nano machines called enzymes. But what we're talking about is prebiotic long before enzymes themselves are made and the enzymes themselves are made out of the amino acids and proteins. Then after we have the amino acids we've got to have the carbohydrates - the carbohydrates are another class of molecules and then you have to hook the carbohydrates together. The carbohydrate hooking together pattern is extremely complex. Just the simple carbohydrate d-mannose - if you just make six units of that d-mannose that d-mannose can be hooked together in over one trillion different ways depending on how they're branched and what the constitution is of the of the primary linkage point. Over 12 trillion combinations and only one works, only one will work. How do you get that?
Now you also have to have the lipids. The lipids have to have two tails not one. If you have the mono ACO lipid that destabilizes any lipid bilayer and these also have chiral centers. Again, how is that done in a prebiotic system - nobody knows, and then you have to have the nucleic acids and so you have to have the nucleobases and those nuclear bases have to somehow hook very cleanly to a carbohydrate that had to independently be made, and then you have your nucleotide with a phosphate group that then has to hook together. Again that's only done by enzymes. We don't know how to do that cleanly before there's enzymes. All of those pieces we don't know how to make, let alone hook together. Some might suggest that there are certain laws that we don't yet know. Undefined laws that would dictate the origin of first life. It's very hard to comment on something that we don't know anything about. However one would have to have law upon law upon law upon law one after another after another to make the requisite molecules needed for life and then to have those requisite molecules assembled because even if one had the molecules, which is very hard to do, how do you do the assembly. We don't know how to do that. Now if there's some law to do this remember just the interactome, just the protein-protein interactions within a single yeast cell, with the 3,000 proteins it's 10 to the 79 billion power on the possible combinations of just the interact on how do you get those to order. . . .
Every year we understand more about the complexity so we are more befuddled now than we were in 1952 because we found that this is not just a protoplasm, but highly complex environment. So when a cell wants to move material from point A to point B, as in a factory you see these overhead carriers carrying machined parts from point A to point B. That's exactly what happens in a cell - you want to carry material from point A to point B. A microtubule will form between point A and point B and then materials will transfer cross that. But then what happens is that microtubule then dissolves and then is reconstructed somewhere else where you need other material transferred between any other two points. Why does a cell go through this - because if it kept all of those microtubules in place it would become too rigid and couldn't function and you would run out of the building blocks to build more microtubules. So it has the ability to morph its structure of its factory on-the-fly. Something we don't even know how to do the complexity of. This is so grand and the complexity becomes more and greater every day. . . . .