Biography of Alexandr Ivanovich Oparin | Soviet biochemist.

(Uglic, Jaroslav, 1894 - Moscow, 1980) , pioneer in the development of theories biochemical above of the origin of life. He studied in Moscow, where it later became Professor of fitofisiologia and biochemistry. In 1935, together with Bakh, founded and organized the biochemical Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, which would go from 1946 until his death. His studies on the origin of life pose, in synthesis, explaining the process that led to the emergence of living beings by transforming simple proteins in organic aggregates by functional affinity.

Oparin underlined the fact that in the first moments of the history of the Earth, the atmosphere did not contain oxygen (which was then generated by plant photosynthesis). Before the appearance of life simple organic substances could have existed in a sort of primitive broth. He added that the first organisms were, probably, heterotrophic, i.e., that they used as food organic substances and did not have the capacity, as the current autotrophic, nurture of inorganic substances. Oparin, the key features of life are its organization and integration, and the processes that lead to such a life should be susceptible of reasonable speculation and experimentation.

His theories initially faced strong opposition, but with the passage of time have received experimental support and have been accepted as a legitimate hypothesis by the scientific community. Thus, many of its ideas were corroborated in 1952 by S.L. Miller experiments. The character pioneer of his works on this subject was a fundamental stimulus in investigations. Some of the titles of English translations of his works are The Origin of Life on Earth (3rd ed., 1957), Life: Its Nature, Origin and Development (1961) and Evolutionary Development of Life (1968).

Extracted from the website: Biografías y Vidas