Albert Eschenmoser, Professor of Organic Chemistry at the ETH, Zhrich, was awarded the 2002 Oparin Medal at the closing banquet in Oaxaca, Mexico. With its highest award, ISSOL acknowledges Eschenmoser’s important contributions to the field of origins of life. From this perspective, Eschenmoser’s most striking accomplishments are related to the evolutionary "fitness" of nucleic acids and related molecules and the question of why specific structures are more suited for a role in evolution rather than others. Below is the text of the announcement of the award as presented in Oaxaca.
The tradition for this point in the program has become rather firmly established.
In my introduction and announcement of the winner of the 2002 Oparin Medal, I am supposed to gradually build up to the actual name by giving you a series of hints as to who the medalist might be. Tonight, this will be no easy task, as our award winner is very easily recognized.
Our winner was born somewhere in Europe. His or her first known educational ambition seems to have been to become a secondary school teacher. However, quite soon our laureate encountered a formidable chemist and, in the tradition of that science where great chemists inspire and influence other great chemists, went on to study organic chemistry under Ruzicka. Soon after obtaining his degree, natural product chemistry began to play a major role in the career of our subject, who has made important discoveries which have been crucial - not only in elucidating the necessary pathways toward the total synthesis of such compounds - but also in understanding and predicting the biochemical pathways of synthesis.
He has said that the problems involved in such research lead inevitably to questions of origin and consequently of biogenesis. He has not been timid about asking the question WHY? Why were particular structures better fitted for their role in biochemistry than others? Why, for example, was Vitamin B12 based on a corrin structure and not a related ring system? The answer was only possible via a complete understanding of the synthesis.
He has described this approach as "chemical aetiology."
The distinguished accomplishments of our award winner are so obvious, that members of ISSOL were waiting in line, so to speak, to nominate him. In fact, he almost didn’t get nominated before the deadline because some of our most prestigious members were doing an "apres vous’ routine for the honor of the nomination. To quote from the letter of nomination:
"He is widely acknowledged to be one of the world’s outstanding organic chemists. His work on the synthesis of Vitamin B12, for example, is one of the major accomplishments of synthetic organic chemistry in the past several decades. What makes this work particularly important for studies of origins of life is his long-standing belief that many of the central molecules of biochemistry are molecules that can be formed by spontaneous self-assembly from simple precursors. It was this fundamental interest that led him to ask why nature had chosen RNA rather than some related molecules as a repository of genetic information."
In his pursuit of an answer to this fundamental question, this famous Swiss organic chemist began with t he problem of ribose synthesis and discovered a selective route to this critical sugar. He then went on to theoretically analyze, and finally synthesize the most interesting alternative backbone structures related to DNA and RNA and showed that some of these models possess remarkable characteristics. I could easily go on for the next hour or more summarizing some of these properties, but will mention only one example. The base-pairing and selective behavior displayed by at least one of his discoveries suggest a possible solution to the problem which Joyce and Orgel called "enantiomeric cross-inhibition" and which for many years appeared to be a major obstacle in the path of template-directed synthesis. There is no telling where this story will end, as the goal of his research program is increasingly focusing not only on simpler structures and their self-organizing properties, but on synthetic pathways which could also provide a compelling argument for prebiotic origins. I am privileged to be able to award the 2002 Oparin medal to Albert Eschenmoser.
