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Arlington Heights scientist says he has uncovered the origins of life

Posted on: Tuesday, 8 July 2003, 06:00 CDT

A suburban scientist says he believes he's found the answer to a quandary that has vexed humanity for thousands, if not tens of thousands, of years:

How did life on Earth begin?

Not through chemistry or physics alone, but a combination of sunlight and quantum mechanics, said Marek Lassota of Arlington Heights, a 57-year-old Polish-born engineer and tinkerer who holds about 20 patents.

His idea is this: As light waves begin their 93 million-mile journey from the sun to Earth, information is encoded in their valleys, or dips, and especially in the ultraviolet portion of the sun's spectrum.

Once sunlight reaches the earth, the encoded information reacts with terrestrial chemistry on a sub-atomic level, forcing the creation of recombinant nucleic acid, or RNA - the precursor to deoxyribonucleic acid or DNA, the double-helix blueprint for life.

According to Lassota's "Code Theory," this process not only happened 3.8 billion to 4 billion years ago, but is still at work here and beyond our solar system on planets capable of sustaining life.

"It's a very tantalizing connection of seemingly unrelated things," said Porter Johnson, a professor of theoretical physics at the Illinois Institute of Technology. "It's an interesting scenario for the origin of life."

Origin of all species?

The theory is laid out in Lassota's book, "Life Decoded: The Sun, Your Origin and the Creation of Life in the Universe." Over 432 pages, he details the theory, supporting evidence culled from existing scientific literature and a list (also from existing literature) of what Lassota considers to be 51 requirements that any origin of life theory must meet.

Not surprisingly, his code theory meets them all. Its key lies in the wave-like nature of light.

The peaks and valleys of light waves can be charted with a spectrograph - a machine that breaks light into its constituent colors, ranging from the infra-red through the visible spectrum (red, yellow, green, etc.) to the ultraviolet.

The color bands are crossed by dark lines known as Fraunhofer Lines, named for the German scientist Joseph von Fraunhofer, who discovered them in 1814.

Each line indicates the presence of a specific chemical element (which is how astronomers are able to determine the chemical composition of the sun and other stars).

But what's the connection between Fraunhofer Lines and RNA/DNA? First, they represent similar organizations of a huge amount of data. Second, put the lines and DNA patterns side by side, and they both look like a UPC bar code.

"These are the only two instances in nature where massive amounts of information are organized in the same way. It's just star spectrum and life," Lassota said. "One second, and I said, 'Oh, this is the connection.' That was it."

Information from sunlight transfers to RNA/DNA through photosynthesis, but chemistry can't do it alone, Lassota said. Physics and quantum mechanics appear to play critical roles, too.

Lassota writes in "Life Decoded" that his theory establishes "for the first time, a direct link between physics and the origin of life."

The idea's genesis came in 1991, while Lassota was reading books on nucleosynthesis (the process of how elements are created inside stars) and the origins of life.

"To me, it became almost evident that there was a much bigger connection between light and all that other stuff," he said. "To me, although I didn't have a smoking gun, it's all connected."

The epiphany came in 1995, in the Borders Bookstore in Schaumburg, as he perused the Encyclopaedia of Physics and a book on DNA. He realized the lines of a DNA analysis and the analytical lines of light from the sun were identical in appearance.

That led to more reading and a paper written in 1996. Lassota then realized there was more to write, and got funding to research and write a book. He also borrowed money for the effort that has taken most of his time since 1997.

"I de facto staked all my future on this project. It's as simple as that," Lassota said.

Lassota sent copies of "Life Decoded" to 60 scientists whose works he'd quoted, and to NASA's Astrobiology Institute.

But aside from IIT's Johnson and a few others, he's had little response.

Where's the beef?

What feedback Lassota has gotten suggests there's something serious here.

In a forward he wrote for "Life Decoded," Johnson said "the indirect evidence provided by Lassota is overwhelming."

Andrzej Staruszkiewicz, a professor of theoretical physics at Jagiellonian University in Lassota's native Poland, wrote that Lassota's theory is "coherent and plausible" and "a truly intriguing vision."

For now, however, a vision is all it is, Johnson said. The theory is speculation, but as speculations go, "it is an interesting one," he added.

The sun is surely at center of life, because without it no life would exist, Johnson said. And there is agreement among some scientists that photochemistry is a critical part of the process of life, he added.

Lassota's book "is interesting from a cultural viewpoint in that scientists are going to say, 'Where's the beef?' like that burger commercial," Johnson said. "It might go over well as an idea for general audience."

Lassota was born in Mielec, Poland, in 1946, the son of one of Poland's leading aircraft designers.

By age 15, he was a glider pilot but got bored with it. And at 21, he invented his first engine. As a student at the Warsaw University of Technology, he studied chemistry, electronics, mathematics and physics.

He came to Chicago in 1970, to the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he developed a prototype rotary engine in the early 1970s from which he developed a line of compressors. He ran a compressor company from 1984 to 1993.

In 1995, he began day trading, and though he was making some money at it, he said it became a time killer.

A holder of several patents, he said his inventive quality was key to discovering the code theories.

"I think this is very important because it's the ability to connect unconnected things ... that others don't see as connected," he said. "I was very well primed at the time to accept the challenge, no doubt about it."

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