BRIEF  SUMMARY

 

Creating life from ordinary chemicals in a lab?

 

Recently issued U.S. Patent No. 6,057,424 describes a machine to create primordial life from ordinary chemicals.  A new hypothesis is proposed for the origin of life on Earth.  The machine is designed to retrace in a lab the steps that generated primordial life on Earth from inanimate chemicals.  The proposed life creating machine is called the "Electro-Particle Reactor", or "EPR" for short.  

The scientist and inventor, Dr. W. Banning Vail, contends that Dr. Stanley Miller and Dr. Harold Urey almost got it right with their famous experiments some 40 years ago.  Those experiments provided laboratory simulations of lightning in the early atmosphere of the earth to generate organic compounds.  However, Miller and Urey subjected their compounds to circulating water to simulate the presence of oceans. 

Vail notes that water unwinds, or destroys DNA.  So, how could DNA have been formed in a Miller-Urey apparatus?  How could life have spontaneously developed from self-assembled molecules in the early oceans of the Earth if water causes DNA to unwind? 

The new Patent has the view that life is a robust phenomenon in the universe.  This view contends that life will spontaneously generate as soon as chemically and physically possible.  Vail surmises that perhaps four billion years ago, the surface of the Earth was molten, and all the oceans now on Earth were in the then atmosphere.  That early atmosphere is named the "vitasphere". 

The "vitasphere" was a cauldron of steam, clouds, volcanic ash, and debris from massive asteroid and cometary impacts, all bathed in epic lightning storms.  The name "vitasphere" derives from the Latin word "vita", which means "life", and the Latin "sphaera", which means "sphere".

The Patent hypothesizes that life began in the vitasphere, which later rained down into the oceans during the "Last Great Condensation".  Those "seeds" of life that rained down later evolved within the oceans to produce life on Earth as we now know it.

Still, where did DNA come from?  All living things on Earth have the same type of DNA chemical make-up.  Vail contends that small fragments of layered silicates, clays, or dust particles in the vitasphere acted as electrically charged templates.  Those templates, or catalysts, allowed DNA to self-assemble from the other chemicals present. 

All crime lab personnel know that the fragments making up DNA are electrically charged.  Those charged fragments are nucleotides.  So isn't it plausible that electrically charged dust particles collected up those nucleotides?  The DNA would then spontaneously self-assemble.  This could have happened in a very rapid chain-reaction, self-replicating, run-away process, that is described in the Patent. 

Dr. Cairns-Smith proposed some 20 years ago that clay could generate life from rocks within the Earth (but not in the early atmosphere).  Cairns-Smith stated: "It is certainly no new idea that this most earthly of materials, clay should have been the stuff of first life - it is in the Bible."  Interestingly, Miller and Urey did not inject clay fragments or dust into their early apparatus.

In yet a further hypothesis in the Patent, Vail contends that "oil drop life" might have developed in the vitasphere which may have been the "Progenote" of all living things.  Perhaps this "oil drop life" used a form of photosynthesis to use the then existing supply of carbon dioxide, water vapor, and light in the vitasphere to provide energy for this early form of life.

Sound crazy?  Vail states that he wishes to bring this forward now so that much of the scientific community can greet this new idea with hostility and scorn.  Hopefully, a few will come forth with constructive criticism and offers to collaborate.  Then Vail intends to build the machine to see what crawls out of it.  Perhaps he can have something new in his lab to greet the worst of his detractors.  Even Frankenstein might be delighted with such a prospect.

At a minimum, Vail hopes for general consensus on at least the following three points:  (a) something resembling the vitasphere appeared during the Earth's early history;  (b) this vitasphere had important implications for the origin of life on Earth;  and (c) these ideas have been substantially overlooked by science until this work.

U.S. Patent No. 6,057,424 was issued to Dr. W. Banning Vail of Bothell, Washington.  A portion of the Patent describes the document entitled "Method and Apparatus to Create Primordial Life from Inanimate Chemicals" (that is substantially repeated in the Patent beginning on page 19, line 15).  He is working on his book about this topic entitled "Born of Lightning and Dust" (Copyright © 2000 Vail).

Vail acknowledges the many challenges facing this endeavor.  However, he had an extraordinary experience in March of 1996, and has been diligently working on this new idea ever since.  Before 1996, he knew absolutely nothing about the origin of life problem.

Nevertheless, how life formed on Earth is one of the great unanswered mysteries of our time.  Hopefully, the new hypothesis set forth here, and the proposed life generating apparatus, will ultimately prove to be of profound significance in this scientific quest for truth. 

Under these circumstances, Vail does request a courtesy from his conservative, and justifiably skeptical business associates.  Vail simply wishes to have the genuine latitude to publicly propose and discuss these new controversial ideas without unduly interfering with other new inventions that are currently in the process of being commercialized.  To my business associates, thank you for your courtesy.

And now, to interested and concerned ethicists, theologians, and fellow citizens, please join with me to understand the ethical, religious, and moral implications of this work.  Your comments and criticisms are welcome.

And to my interested and concerned fellow scientists, please assist me and others to properly design experiments that will cause no harm to life on this planet should the Electro-Particle Reactor generate primordial life, or some other form of life, from ordinary chemicals in the laboratory.

 

Following this Brief Summary are "Corrections to U.S. Patent No. 6,057,424".  That document provides a note to the interested reader which identifies certain errors that appeared in the printed Patent.

Following those Corrections, the entire Patent is presented, including all 10 images of figures, and 18 images of written text.  Hand-written annotations in the margins of the images of the Patent show corrections of various errors that appeared in the printed Patent.

 

                 

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