STANFORD UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER

DEPARTMENT OF GENETICS
November 18, 1976

Dr. Richard Young es

Planetary Programs

Office of Space Science

National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Washington, D.C. 20546

Dear Dick,

I have never felt that a correspondence needed to be an exact ping pong
game with each letter following another's response, so I am sharing some of
my current thoughts with you by way of drafting this letterj;and, of course,
I would be glad to hear from you whenever you wished;but I do not want this
to be laying a trip on you.

This has a little more to do with the ideas I was mentioning to you before
about looking for the eobionts; and of course it was in that connection that I
was hoping that you might be interested to share some of your tine with us in
a course of a sabbatical.

If we take the hint from the my Coplasmas as being probably the most
primitive free-living organisms now recognized, it seems a reasonable
proposition that the eobiont might not have a rigid cell wall. - like the
bacteria, fungi or higher plants. This would be all the more amusing to me
since I did dabble once with the L forms of common bacteria and you might be
amused to see the enclosed reprint.

If this is the case, the eobiont either requires a hypertonic medium,
or a structural matrix externally available, or perhaps both. The idea of the
matrix set me to thinking again about carbon. And I am going to enclose another
semi-contribution from my own lab - I have to say I did not think the work was
quite credible enough to warrant putting my own name on it as well. I also
recalled scattered statements to the effect that bacteria adsorbed onto carbon
were remarkably heat resistant. Whatever else this says, it suggests that in
forms like charcoal there are voids that must be shaped to at least a rough
approximation to a niche for a bacterial cell.

Then it dawned on me that the issues about the complexity of the chemical
structures ;that could be readily formed from carbon by oxidation and other re-
actions (I mentioned those in connection with the convergence of the problems
of water purification on earth with that of the Viking biology on Mars)-may not
have been given enough attention in general models about the origin of life,
The fact is, as you know, that elemental carbon,whether in the graphite or
diamond constitution,already represents an extremely intricate polymeric
structure which could be significant to the origin of life in its initial phases
in at least two ways: (1) the production of quite complex, especially aromatic,
products by simple further manipulations of either reduction or oxidation; and
(2) as a seat of highly diverse catalytic activities -— of which the Warburg
story of iron/charcoal mediated oxidations is the obvious precedent.

7 _2-

DEPARTMENT OF GENETICS, STANFORD UNIVERSITY SCHOOL CF MEDICINE, STANFORD, CALIFORNIA 24395 * (415) 497-5052
Dr. Richard Young -2- 11/18/76

So the phantasy dream,of life emerging as a niche between two plates of

* carbon hexacycles in graphite, began to take an even more tangible form. This

of course is just at the other end of the spectrum from the idea of using

carbon as a matrix to permit possibly eobiontic relics to grow, and one does

not have to believe in the continuity of those ideas to see something worthwhile
at both ends. , oS

The fact is, in our labs here we are already committed to a research
program on the chemistry of fragments from activated carbon -— from the en-
vironmental hazard standpoint - so, there is really no operational jump from
this fo just thinking about the kinds of products that might be seen from a
biopoetic standpoint. Too, I am astonished that much more has not been done
long since to follow up on Warburg's observations about the catalysis of bio-
chemical reactions by activated carbons. Now that we have such sensitive methods,
it should be quite easy to look for the catalysis of low-level activities in a
varlety of spheres. I would not exclude the polymerization of ATP and the like
as quite reasonable expectations from catalytic centers of this kind.

And then (3) (together with a few other ideas that involve taking seriously
what we know of the chemical composition of the primitive earth)to try to
fashion habitats for one of the problematical speculations about what more
primitive organisms might look like.

Well, these phantasies are just beginning to crystallize to the point
where I might want to take them seriously enough to actually start some
experiments. Any time you like to join up with any of this, it would be great
fun. ‘

Meantime, the one thing that you might be able to do quite conveniently
is to let me know whether you have seen any references to the role of carbon
along these lines in the bibliographies on biepoiesis that I am sure you
nave been accumulating.

he

§ haps ape Carr Sincerely yours,

ata hat - - ceneattguve KLO®
a . 4 J ua Lederberg
asin » S. Professor of Genetics

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