Leslie Orgel

Leslie Eleazer Organ ( born January 12, 1927 in London, † October 27, 2007 in San Diego, USA ) was a British chemist. He was co-founder of the ligand field theory of transition metals and researchers in the field of chemical evolution.

Life and work

Organ was since 1964 a professor and director of the Laboratory of Chemical Evolution at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, and brought in the 1970s, the panspermia hypothesis again in the discussion, after which the earliest forms of life on Earth did not occur here, but by meteorite you came from outer space.

Francis Crick, the rule established by him " Evolution is cleverer than you are" ( "Evolution is more sophisticated than you are "), named after Leslie Orgel Orgel than rule.

Along with Stanley Miller suggested organ also the idea that peptide nucleic acids (PNA ) - instead of the ribonucleic acid ( RNA) - the first car capable of replication präbiotischenen systems formed on the early Earth. Developed for NASA organ analytical tools with which took the Viking spacecraft to Mars.

In his book The Origins of Life Organ coined the term specified one complexity to describe what living organisms from inanimate objects is different.

Leslie organ research at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla and was an adjunct professor at the University of California, San Diego.

In private, he was a lover of oriental carpets.

Publications

• An Introduction to Transition - Metal Chemistry. The Ligand Field Theory. 2nd edition. Methuen, London 1967.
• The Origins of Life. Molecules and Natural Selection. Chapman & Hall, London 1973, ISBN 0-412-11910-2.
• The Origins of Life on the Earth. Prentice- Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N. J. 1974, ISBN 0-13-642082-6 ( with Stanley L. Miller).