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Dr. Cyril A. Ponnamperuma, a chemist who explored the chemical paths by which life might have originated, died on Tuesday at Washington Adventist Hospital. He was 71 and lived in Washington.
He had suffered cardiac arrest in his office at the University of Maryland in College Park, the university said.
In the search for lifes origin, Dr. Ponnamperuma was widely known for his optimistic belief that a chemical explanation would be found. Since 1971 he had been director of the Laboratory of Chemical Evolution at the University of Maryland. From 1963 to 1971, he conducted research at the National Aeronautics and Space Administrations Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif.
He tried to learn how the basic building blocks of life could have been synthesized outside a living cell. He had no doubt at all, he said, that life could some day be created in the laboratory.
He told an international conference that the division between life and nonlife is perhaps an artificial one. But he declined to predict how soon life could be synthesized.Continue reading the main story
In 1984 he told a conference in Hawaii that his laboratory had produced the five components -- adenine, guanine, thymine, cytosine and uracil -- from which nucleic acids are formed. Many scientists believe that the appearance of ribonucleic acid, or RNA, and deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, was necessary before complex life forms could evolve. These acids carry the genetic information in living cells and translate it into useful proteins.
Another crucial component of life, the energy-transporting molecule adenosine triphosphate, was synthesized in Dr. Ponnamperumas laboratory at Ames. A test for its presence was to sprinkle it on fireflies, which would then glow. Sufficient fireflies were obtained from a dealer in Mount Vernon, N.Y., and they glowed as hoped.
Cyril Andrew Ponnamperuma was born in Galle, Ceylon, now Sri Lanka. His parents were educators and persuaded him to study philosophy at the University of Madras in India, where he received his bachelors degree in 1948.
He then changed his studies to chemistry, which, he said later, was more apt to put bread on the table. At Birkbeck College at the University of London he studied under J. D. Bernal, who had speculated on possible ways that life could have originated. While studying there for his bachelor of science degree, he worked as an industrial chemist.
At the University of California at Berkeley, he was a pupil of Dr. Melvin Calvin, a Nobel laureate whose laboratory was doing research on synthesis of the basic building blocks of life. There, in 1962, Dr. Ponnamperuma obtained his doctorate. He then went to work at the Ames Research Center.
At Ames, he studied the wide variety of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, found in a certain class of meteorites. These meteorites fell on Earth in the planets early history.
Other research was inspired by an experiment carried out in the 1950s by Dr. Harold Urey and Dr. Stanley L. Miller, who synthesized amino acids by firing electric sparks in a solution of their components, mimicking the assumed conditions of the early earth.
Dr. Ponnamperuma supported the work of Dr. Sidney W. Fox at the University of Miami, who cooked mixtures of amino acids to very high temperatures. When the mixture was cooled, it formed tiny spheres which, Dr. Fox argued, behaved much like proteins. Dr. Ponnamperuma also took seriously the recent proposal that life may have originated in the superheated vents on the deep sea floor.
In a radio broadcast from Sri Lanka, the author Arthur C. Clarke, who lives there and was a longtime friend of Dr. Ponnamperuma, termed him the leading authority on the origins of life.
Dr. Ponnamperuma was a champion of international efforts in science and last year was awarded the first Harold Urey Prize by the Russian Academy of Creative Arts. In 1991 France made him a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres for his international efforts. Last October he was named to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in Rome. Since 1984 he had been science and technology adviser to the President of Sri Lanka.
For more than a decade he was editor in chief of the journal Origins of Life. His book, Origins of Life, has been published in many languages.
He is survived by his wife, the former Valli Pal, whom he married in 1955; a daughter, Roshini, of Washington; two brothers, and two sisters.Continue reading the main story
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