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Harold Morowitz

Not Your Grandfather’s Origin of Life Theory

The Santa Fe Institute Bulletin vol. 26, 2012 reviews the Origin of Life Theory resulting from fifty years of study carried out by Professor Morowitz and his colleagues at George Mason University and the Santa Fe Institute. Changes in the theory are stressed. Click here to read the full article.

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Harold Morowitz

Mason and the Santa Fe Institute Plan STEM Summer Program for High School Teachers

Robinson Professor Harold Morowitz is a part of a planning committee for a summer program for high school science teachers. The program is being planned by George Mason University and the Santa Fe Institute, focusing on “The Origin of Life from Geochemistry to the Genetic Code.” Click here for more information.

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Harold Morowitz

Colloquium on “The Origins of Life”

On Friday, November 19th, 2010, Robinson Professor Harold Morowitz gave a presentation to students in the Honors College. He spoke about the origins of life describing how scientists look at the “phenomenon from the top down by looking for molecular features common to all organisms and from the bottom up by looking for those features of geochemistry, chemical networks, and non-equilibrium physics favorable to the emergence of life.”

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Harold Morowitz

Transition Metal Catalysts Led to Origin of Life?

WASHINGTON: Scientists have proposed that a third type of catalyst , apart from biochemicals-such as amino acids and nucleotides and biological catalysts (proteins or ribozymes), was responsible for origin of life on Earth .

According to Harold Morowitz of George Mason University (GMU), Vijayasarathy Srinivasan of GMU, and Eric Smith of the Santa Fe Institute, molecular structures involving transition metal elements (iron, copper, nickel, etc.) and ligands (small organic molecules) could have catalyzed the synthesis of basic biochemicals (monomers) that acted as building blocks for more complex molecules, leading ultimately to the origin of life.

You can read the rest of this article at The Economic Times.

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Harold Morowitz

Professor Morowitz Has Works Published

Harold Morowitz, Robinson Professor of Biology and Natural Philosophy, cowrote “Ligand Field Theory and the Origin of Life as an Emergent Feature of the Periodic Table,” which was published in the Biological Bulletin 219, 2010. He also cowrote “How Life Began, the Emergence of Sparse Metabolic Networks,” which was published in the Journal of Cosmology 10, August 2010.