Word: ponnamperuma
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Three planets were nominated as possible havens for such life. Nobel Chemistry Laureate Willard F. Libby speculated that oxygen detected on Venus by a Soviet space probe last October may well be the product of plant photosynthesis. Jupiter, said NASA Chemist Cyril Ponnamperuma, has an atmosphere similar to that which enveloped the earth during its first 100 million years; the swirling Jovian gases, he added, may already have combined into basic life-building molecules. But the strongest argument was made on behalf of Mars. Despite its freezing temperatures and apparent lack of oxygen, explained NASA Microbiologist Harold P. Klein, life...
...their experiments, Chemist Cyril Ponnamperuma and Geochemist Gordon Hodgson flashed a continuous electric arc through a mixture of ammonia, methane and water vapor at NASA's Ames Research Center, near San Francisco. The arc simulated lightning, and the mixture was similar to the atmosphere that most scientists believe existed before life began. In addition to the amino acids, proteins, nucleotides and other life-foundation molecules that were created in previous experiments-some by Ponnamperuma himself-a small amount of an unidentified substance was produced...
Giant Crater. In a related experiment, Ponnamperuma and NASA Chemist Fritz Woeller flashed artificial lightning through a mixture of ammonia and methane simulating Jupiter's atmosphere. Besides producing amino acids and other organic materials that have led experimenters to speculate that primitive life could exist in the Jovian atmosphere, the discharges created large quantities of a translucent, ruby-red organic dye. This dye, the scientists speculate, may well explain the mark on Jupiter's surface, 30,000 miles long and 8,000 miles wide, that astronomers call the Great Red Spot...
...break-through in the investigation of the origin of life, was announced Sunday by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. The experimental results have just been published in the British journal Nature by Carl Sagan, assistant professor of Astronomy and a member of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, and by Dr. Cyril Ponnamperuma and Miss Ruth Mariner of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration...
...When Dr. Ponnamperuma added hydrogen to the mix in the tube, less adenine was formed, and he concluded that life could not have developed on earth until most of the free hydrogen in the earth's primitive atmosphere had escaped into space. Only then could adenine and similar chemicals have been made out of methane, ammonia and water. Gradually, those chemicals accumulated in the ocean where the first life appeared, and at last they formed nucleic acid, life's key substance...