Chapter 2. The Chemical Nature of Life

Analyze the Data
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Analyze the Data 2-1: The Chemical Nature of Life

During much of the "Age of Enlightenment" in eighteenth-century Europe, scientists toiled under the belief that living things and the inanimate world were fundamentally distinct forms of matter. Then, in 1828, Friedrich Wöhler showed that he could synthesize urea, a well-known waste product of animals, from the minerals silver isocyanate and ammonium chloride. "I can make urea without kidneys!" he is said to have remarked. Of Wöhler's discovery, the preeminent chemist Justus von Liebig wrote in 1837 that the "production of urea without the assistance of vital functions … must be considered one of the discoveries with which a new era in science has commenced." Slightly more than 100 years later, Stanley Miller discharged sparks into a mixture of H2O, CH4, NH3, and H2 in an effort to simulate the chemical conditions of an ancient reducing Earth atmosphere (the sparks mimicked lightning striking a primordial sea or "soup") and identified many biomolecules in the resulting mixture, including amino acids and carbohydrates. What do these experiments suggest about the nature of biomolecules and the relationship between organic (living) and inorganic (nonliving) matter? What do they suggest about the evolution of life? What do they indicate about the value of chemistry in understanding living things?
_feedback: Biomolecules are relatively easy to synthesize from inorganic starting materials, which suggests that living and nonliving matter are not fundamentally different. Living matter is subject to the same laws of physics and chemistry that govern nonliving matter. The fact that biomolecules can be produced through nonliving, chemical processes suggests that life itself could have evolved by similar means. Biochemistry attempts to describe the mechanisms that give rise to living systems from the perspective of the molecules that make up living things. We can often gain considerable insight into the properties of a living thing by studying the structure and chemistry of its molecules.

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