• ORGANIC ORIGINS
• ORIGINS OF EXOBIOLOGY
• NSCORT BY THE SEA
• SEASONING A THIN SOUP
• NOT-SO-DISTANT FUTURE

NSCORT BY THE SEA

To the scientists who submitted a proposal to start an NSCORT in La Jolla, the chance for leading thinkers to collaborate in a well-funded environment was tantalizing. Scripps's participation in the program was a natural, although ocean and space sciences might seem as distant from one another as the distance between the ocean and outer space themselves. On the contrary, oceanographers at Scripps have been involved in space science almost since the beginning of the institution.

In addition, the search for the origins of life on Earth demands an intimate knowledge of marine chemistry and geology, the backbone of much Scripps research. For Bada, a scientist whose background is in organic chemistry, the connection between the ocean and the origins of life is a simple one: there would be no life here without the ocean.

In 1992, NASA accepted the proposal of the La Jolla scientists and the NSCORT program was launched. Its first director was Stanley L. Miller, who mentored Bada when the latter was a graduate chemistry student at UCSD.

The proposal approval meant nearly unbeatable access to grant money. NSCORT receives $960,000 a year and, because of its multicampus composition and emphasis on student training, is allowed to keep 72 percent of the monies to fund research. Consider that researchers must usually devote half or more of their grant money to university overhead costs.

"With five years of guaranteed support, you can do research that takes on answering the major questions," Bada said. "The block of five years is an incentive to take risks."

The researchers achieved early successes. Some of these accomplishments include finding what might be the earliest evidence of life on Earth, discovering the strongest evidence yet that comets seeded Earth with organic material needed for life to begin, and clarifying the point at which prebiotic matter crosses the threshold to become actual life.

Miller, for instance, has spent the past several years investigating what he believes to have been the first genetic material on Earth. His name also lends another kind of cachet to the team. Decades ago, Miller made a name for himself as one half of the famed Miller–Urey experiments. The research team coined the term "primordial soup," referring to the prehistoric muck from which life was believed to have arisen.

Miller's experiments in Harold Urey's laboratory at the University of Chicago in 1952 and 1953 gained worldwide attention with their conclusions about the beginnings of life on Earth. Miller synthesized amino acids in a glass chamber to simulate an environment that represented his best guess at Earth's early atmosphere. The world he simulated had what is known as a reducing atmosphere, one filled with methane, ammonia, hydrogen, and water vapor that could nurture the genesis of organic material when cooked into existence by concentrated energy from lightning strikes.

By the time NSCORT came into existence, however, evidence was emerging that Earth had a nonreducing or oxidizing atmosphere that breaks down organic material. Such an atmosphere would have consisted primarily of carbon dioxide. In these conditions, it would have been difficult to produce amino acids by a Miller–Urey-type synthesis.