Bernal’s Conception of Origins of Life

Keywords

Clays, catalysis

Abstract

John Desmond Bernal (1091–1971) was a British physicist who claimed in his text entitled The Physical Basis of Life that the origin of life process was located on clay deposits.

History

John Desmond Bernal was a pioneer of diffraction X-ray method. His interest for biology increased during the 1930s and the 1940s, probably in relation with the study of biological molecules (peptides, nucleic acids, etc.) with this new physical method.

His work on origin of life was marked by his first publication on this topic in 1951: a little book entitled The Physical Basis of Life, which came from a previous lecture (1947), and from a paper published in 1949 in the Proceedings of the Physical Society.

In this text, Bernal gave a synthesis of previous theories, that is, Oparine’s (1924, 1937), Haldane’s (1929), or Dauvillier’s (1947) ones. Such as he claimed that primitive atmosphere of earth contained CO₂and he described the possibility of a progressive...