Leslie Orgel
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Leslie Eleazer Orgel (born Jan 12, 1927 in London) is a chemist. He helped developing ligand field theory, which describes chemical bonding in coordination complexes.
During the 1970s, Orgel suggested reconsidering the Panspermia hypothesis, according to which the earliest forms of life on earth did not originate here, but arrived from outer space with meteorites.
Together with Stanley Miller, Orgel also suggested that peptide nucleic acids - rather than ribonucleic acids - constituted the first pre-biotic Systems capable of self-replication on early Earth.
His name is popularly known because of Orgel's rules, credited to him, particularly Orgel's Second Rule: "Evolution is cleverer than you are".
For NASA, Orgel co-developed the analysis instrumentation, that the Viking space robots took to the planet Mars.
In his book The Origins of Life, Orgel coined the concept of specified complexity, to describe the criterion by which living organisms are distinguished from non-living matter.
As of 2004, he is a professor in the Chemical Evolution Laboratory of the Salk Institute and at the University of California, San Diego.
[edit] Publications
- Leslie E. Orgel, An Introduction to Transition-Metal Chemistry. The Ligand Field Theory, 1961
- Leslie E. Orgel, The Origins of Life: Molecules and Natural Selection, 1973
- Leslie E. Orgel and Stanley L. Miller, The Origins of Life on the Earth, 1974
[edit] External link
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