Etiology of potentially primordial biomolecular structures: from vitamin B12 to the nucleic acids and an inquiry into the chemistry of life's origin: a retrospective

"We'll never be able to know" is a truism that leads to resignation with respect to any experimental effort to search for the chemistry of life's origin. But such resignation runs radically counter to the challenge imposed upon chemistry as a natural science. Notwithstanding the prognosis according to which the shortest path to understanding the metamorphosis of the chemical into the biological is by way of experimental modeling of "artificial chemical life", the scientific search for the route nature adopted in creating the life we know will arguably never truly end. It is, after all, part of the search for our own origin.

B12: reminiscences and afterthoughts

This paper describes some of the chemistry of synthetic corrinoids and corphinoids carried out at the ETH (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) after the completion of the non-enzymic synthesis of vitamin B12 and attempts to delineate the interplay between mechanistic hypotheses, model studies and the experimental research in B12 biosynthesis which had spurred this work. The afterthoughts deal with why and how the work on corrinoids eventually led to an experimental involvement in the problem of a chemical aetiology of the structure of natural nucleic acids.