by David Deamer
University of California Press, June 2011
In First Life, an authoritative voice weighs in on a sprawling debate that’s been raging in the scientific community for many decades, and lays out a succinct and persuasive hypothesis for the origin of life on Earth. University of California, Santa Cruz, biomolecular engineer David Deamer envisions a scenario in which life began in shallow, ephemeral pools of water dotting the sides of ancient volcanoes—habitats of a kind that can be seen in Iceland and Hawaii today. Deamer traces the story by traversing the scientific literature, from the first mention of panspermia by Arrhenius in 1903 to his own work on the “soap bubble” theory for the origin of life and his current research on synthetic ...
