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On the Origins of Life
- Abstract
It is 1828, a year that encompassed the death of Shaka, the Zulu king, the passage in the United States of the Tariff of Abominations, and the battle of Las Piedras in South America. It is, as well, the year in which the German chemist Friedrich Wöhler announced the synthesis of urea from cyanic acid and ammonia.
Discovered by H.M. Roulle in 1773, urea is the chief constituent of urine. Until 1828, chemists had assumed that urea could be produced only by a living organism. Wöhler provided the most convincing refutation imaginable of this thesis. His synthesis of urea was noteworthy, he observed with some understatement, because “it furnishes an example of the artificial production of an organic, indeed a so-called animal substance, from inorganic materials.”
About the Author
David Berlinski, the author most recently of Infinite Ascent: A Short History of Mathematics (Modern Library), is a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute.
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