18 Facts About Leslie Orgel

Leslie Eleazer Orgel FRS was a British chemist and member of the National Academy of Sciences, known for his theories on the origin of life.

Leslie Orgel was born in London on 12 January 1927.

Leslie Orgel received his Bachelor of Arts degree in chemistry with first-class honours from the University of Oxford in 1948.

All were impressed by the new DNA model, especially Brenner who subsequently worked with Crick; Leslie Orgel himself worked with Crick at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.

Leslie Orgel developed the Orgel diagram showing the energies of electronic terms in transition metal complexes.

Leslie Orgel formulated his protein-translation error-catastrophe theory of aging in 1963, which has since been experimentally challenged.

In 1964, Leslie Orgel was appointed senior fellow and research professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, where he directed the Chemical Evolution Laboratory.

Leslie Orgel was an adjunct professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California, San Diego, and he was one of five principal investigators in the NASA-sponsored NSCORT program in exobiology.

Leslie Orgel participated in NASA's Viking Mars Lander Program as a member of the Molecular Analysis Team that designed the gas chromatography mass spectrometer instrument that robots took to the planet Mars.

Leslie Orgel's lab came across an economical way to make cytarabine, a compound that is one of today's most commonly used anti-cancer agents.

Leslie Orgel published over three hundred articles in his research areas.

Leslie Orgel proposed a novel solution to a problem with Juan Oro's proposed mechanism of nucleobase synthesis on the early Earth, which relied on the reaction of five molecules of hydrogen cyanide to form adenine.

Leslie Orgel suggested that the hydrogen cyanide was frozen in solution.

For nucleoside synthesis, Leslie Orgel suggested an almost opposite approach, heating a mixture of ribose and the purine nucleobases hypoxanthine, adenine, and guanine to dryness in the presence of magnesium ions.

Leslie Orgel theorised that one single strand of RNA could have been the template for the first life on Earth and that these imidazole-activated nucleotides could have used this RNA template strand to polymerise and replicate.

Lohrmann and Leslie Orgel reported that the phosphorimidazolide derivative of adenosine monophosphate forms short adenosine oligomers in the presence of poly-uridine templates.

Leslie Orgel's theory included genes based on RNA and RNA enzymes.

Almost thirty years later, Leslie Orgel wrote a lengthy review of the RNA World hypothesis.