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Tibor Gánti and the chemoton

#1
C C Offline
He may have found the key to the origins of life. So why have so few heard of him?
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/scien...-chemoton/

EXCERPTS: When biologist Tibor Gánti died on April 15, 2009, at the age of 75, he was far from a household name. Much of his career had been spent behind the Iron Curtain that divided Europe for decades, hindering an exchange of ideas.

But if Gánti’s theories had been more widely known during the communist era, he might now be acclaimed as one of the most innovative biologists of the 20th century. That’s because he devised a model of the simplest possible living organism, which he called the chemoton, that points to an exciting explanation for how life on Earth began.

[...] Gánti’s concept of the simplest possible living organism: genes, metabolism, and membrane, all linked. The metabolism produces building blocks for the genes and membrane, and the genes exert an influence over the membrane. Together they form a self-replicating unit: a cell so simple it could not only arise with relative ease on Earth, it could even account for alternate biochemistries on alien worlds.

“Gánti captured life really well,” says synthetic biologist Nediljko Budisa of the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada. “It was a revelation to read.” However, Budisa discovered Gánti’s work only around 2005. Outside of Eastern Europe, it remained obscure for decades, with only a few English translations on the market.

[...] To some extent, Gánti did not help his model find favor: he was known to be a difficult colleague. Szathmáry says Gánti was stubbornly wedded to his model, and paranoid to boot, making him “impossible to work with.”

But perhaps the biggest problem for the chemoton model was that in the last decades of the 20th century, the trend in research was to strip away the complexity of life in favor of ever more minimalist approaches.

[...] However, scientists in this century have turned the tide. Researchers now tend to emphasise the ways the chemicals of life work together, and how these cooperative networks might have emerged.

Since 2003, Jack Szostak of Harvard Medical School and his colleagues have built increasingly lifelike protocells: simple versions of cells containing a range of chemicals. These protocells can grow and divide, meaning they can self-replicate. [...] Szostak’s research “is very Gánti-like,” says synthetic biologist Petra Schwille...

[...] One argument against the idea of a chemoton as first life has been that it requires so many chemical components, including nucleic acids, proteins, and lipids. Many experts found it unlikely that these chemicals would all arise from the same starting materials in the same place, hence the appeal of stripped-back ideas like the RNA World.

But biochemists have recently found evidence that all the key chemicals of life can form from the same simple starting materials. [...] None of these experiments has yet built a working chemoton. That may simply be because it’s tricky, or it may be that Gánti’s exact formulation is not quite how the first life worked. Still, what the chemoton gives us is a way to think about how life’s components work together, which increasingly drives today’s approaches to understanding how life got started... (MORE - details)
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#2
Syne Offline
We don't know his name because his theory never amounted to anything. It's just a scaffold for atheists scientists to hang their hopes and dreams on. No evidence whatsoever.
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