A 22-year-old boy, the American Stanley Miller, proposed to his boss in 1952 one of the simplest and most ambitious experiments in history: imitate the conditions of the primitive Earth in a glass container, to see if it would emerge from nothing. something similar to life in his laboratory from the University of Chicago. They injected ammonia, methane, hydrogen and water vapor to simulate the atmosphere, they applied electrical discharges as if they were storms and “Eureka!”: soon amino acids appeared, the building blocks of living beings. The Spanish geologist's team Juan Manuel García Ruiz repeated the experiment in 2021 in a Teflon container and surprised the world: there nothing appeared. “The key was the silica in the glass!” exclaims the researcher, who has just received 10 million euros from the EU to study the role of silica (a mineral formed by silicon and oxygen) in the origin of life in the earth.
García Ruiz, born in Seville 70 years ago, constantly talks about the Granada poet Federico García Lorca, even to explain his own studies. The geologist has lived more than 30 years in Granada, as a researcher at the Andalusian Institute of Earth Sciences. The scientist recites verses from memory Poet in New Yorkthe 1929 collection of poems in which Lorca denounced the dehumanization of the great industrial city: “Killed by the sky, / between the forms that go towards the serpent / and the forms that seek the crystal, / I will let my hair fall.”
García Ruiz turns to Lorca to explain the rejection that his own ideas about the origin of life suffered some four decades ago. When the geologist was a student in his twenties at the Complutense University of Madrid, around 1979, he accidentally discovered some amazing structures microscopic minerals, with strange curves and spirals, like the sinuous snakes (the serpents) that Lorca mentioned before the imposing straightness of the glass skyscrapers. Those unusual shapes looked like living beings, but they were simply self-organized precipitates of silica and carbonate in their laboratory containers. Nothing like it had ever been seen.
The geologist remembers that, in an issue of EL PAÍS from June 1980, he saw a historic photo news item: the American biologist's team William Schopf had announced the discovery of bacterial fossils in an Australian desert region, which would demonstrate that there was already life on Earth 3.5 billion years ago. García Ruiz was stunned when he looked at the photograph: the supposed remains of the first living creatures were like the mineral structures that had formed in his laboratory.
Years later, he attended an international conference in Prague on the origin of life to present his discovery. “I was very young and it was the first time I used a laser pointer. He put the laser in my mouth to speak and pointed the microphone at me,” he recalls with a laugh. “At the end, a guy told me: 'Thank you very much, but everything you are saying is completely false.'”
García Ruiz ended up calling those curvilinear mineral microstructures biomorphs, which looked like living beings, but were not. The young geologist encountered international skepticism. “I said that what are considered the first fossils could simply be self-organized structures. It took me years to publish it. They told me that I was doing the experiments wrong, that there was biological contamination, that it was impossible for something inorganic to have those morphologies,” he recalls. The disbelief, according to the geologist, was due to the deep-rooted belief in two separate worlds: the straight geometry of crystal and the exuberant curvature of life. Like Lorca's hair in New York.
The then US president, Bill Clinton, presented to the world on August 7, 1996 a meteor of Martian origin. “It tells us about the possibility of life. “If this discovery is confirmed, it will be one of the most astonishing revelations that science has ever made about our universe,” celebrated Clinton. NASA scientists they defended that the filaments found in the extraterrestrial rock were an indicator of fossilized microbes. García Ruiz, from the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC), insisted in that no.
The Spanish scientist claimed victory in 2003, finally publishing his results in the prestigious magazine Science: His team had synthesized filamentous and curved microstructures, practically identical to the supposed fossils of bacteria found in the Warrawoona formation, in Western Australia. “There was the idea that the inorganic world cannot take on the complex and curved shapes of microfossils. We prove that yes. Morphology cannot be an unequivocal criterion for identifying life,” he says now, during a walk through The exhibition about the British evolutionist Alfred Wallace at the National Museum of Natural Sciences, in Madrid.
García Ruiz's discoveries cast doubt on the solemn announcements about relics of living beings that are 3.5 billion years old, but the geologist does not question the antiquity of life. His hypothesis is that 4.4 billion years ago—after the collision of another planet with the Earth, whose remains gave rise to the Moon—there were already large masses of water, with a superficial capita in which the curves of the silica biomorphs facilitated interactions between the first bricks of life, such as the glass container in Miller's experiment. There are thousands of religions in the world, with thousands of contradictory stories about the appearance of living beings, but García Ruiz believes that none of those thousands of incompatible gods are needed to explain the phenomenon. “I am an atheist,” he ditches.
Starting in May, the Spanish geologist will coordinate the PROTOS project, funded by the European Research Council with almost 10 million euros. He will leave Granada, Lorca, behind to join to the Donostia International Physics Center. García Ruiz's team, together with colleagues from France and Germany, will carry out countless experiments to understand, even at a scale of millionths of a millimeter, how fluids interacted with rocks on the early Earth, to go from a lifeless mineral planet to a world with poets who recite verses on curved lines. “We are going to reinterpret Miller's experiment, because he forgot about silica,” García Ruiz proclaims.
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