Oparin, Alexander Ivanovich (1894-1980), was a Soviet biochemist. His theory of how life on Earth originated from chemical substances became the basis of many later scientific ideas about the origin of life. Oparin also conducted research on the chemical conversion of raw agricultural crops into such products as bread, sugar, and wine.
Oparin’s theory of the origin of life rests on his assumption that the mixture of gases in Earth’s early atmosphere was much different from that of today’s atmosphere. The present atmosphere is about 99 percent oxygen and nitrogen. In Oparin’s view, the early atmosphere was mostly ammonia, hydrogen, and methane. These gases are composed of simple molecules.
Large amounts of these gases would have dissolved in the oceans and would have received energy from sunlight, lightning, and Earth’s internal heat. Oparin suggested how this energy could have caused the simple molecules to combine into more complex molecules and how the complex molecules could have formed larger and larger combinations. After several hundred million years, such combinations could have formed the first living cells.
Oparin was born on March 2, 1894, near Moscow. He graduated from Moscow State University in 1917. He first published his theory in 1924 and expanded it into a book called The Origin of Life on Earth (1936). From 1946 to 1980, Oparin headed the Bahk Institute of Biochemistry in Moscow. He died on April 21, 1980.
