Everything about Joan Or totally explained
Joan Oró i Florensa (
October 26,
1923–
September 2,
2004) was a
Spanish Catalan biochemist whose research has been of importance in understanding the
origin of life.
Oró was born in
Lleida,
Catalonia,
Spain, on
October 26,
1923. From the
1960s he worked with
NASA on the
Viking missions which explored the planet
Mars. His work was essential in the analysis of samples of Martian soil, and suggested that there was in fact no life on Mars.
One of his most important contributions was the prebiotic synthesis of the nucleobase
adenine (a key component
of
nucleic acids) from
hydrogen cyanide.
This was achieved during the period 1959-1962 and stands, together with the
Miller-Urey experiment, as one of the
fundamental results of
prebiotic chemistry. It opened up a research area eventually leading to the complete synthesis of other
components of nucleic acids. He was also the first scientist pointing towards
comets as the carriers of organic molecules to our early
biosphere. This conjecture (formulated in 1961) is largely accepted today.
Oró also provided a chemical interpretation of a set of remarkable results reported by the Viking mission to Mars.
The Viking lander performed a series of experiments, including one designed by Oró, involving a small
gas chromatograph and
mass spectrometer. In one of these experiments, where a set of nutrients was mixed with Martian soil samples, a sudden production of carbon dioxide was reported, initially suggesting the presence of Martian microbes, which would have shown some kind of metabolic processing of nutrients. Oró showed that a simpler, abiotic interpretation was more likely to be the correct one: the catalytic
chemical oxidation of test nutrients.
He was awarded, among other honors, the Cross of Civil Order of Alfonso X el Sabio (
Madrid,
1983), the
Alexander Ivanovich Oparin Medal Award from the
ISSOL (
Berkeley,
1986), the
Creu de Sant Jordi (
1991), and the Medalla del President
Francesc Macià (
2000).
He died in
Barcelona,
Catalonia, Spain, on
September 2 2004.
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