Joan Oró, the world-famous Catalan biochemist, has gone down in history mainly for the discovery of the synthesis of adenine from hydrogen cyanide. This discovery put him on the world stage of science. So much so that NASA ended up knocking on his door. He collaborated with the American agency for more than 30 years and was part of, among other projects, the Apollo 11 mission, which brought man to the Moon. He also participated in the Viking program, which explored the planet Mars. It was precisely in this mission that Oró, thanks to his intervention, avoided what would have been a ridiculous capital letter from the American agency. The story is told in the documentary Joan Oró, la formula de la vida, which CaixaForum is premiering on the audiovisual platform today, just as the centenary of his birth is being celebrated.
It was 1976. Oró, then, had already been collaborating with NASA for years. Among other research, he had analyzed the samples that the Apollo 11 mission had collected from the Moon seven years earlier. In 1976, as a principal investigator at the University of Houston, he participated in the study of the samples that the Viking program had taken from Mars. The documentary explains that one of the experiments detected that radioactive carbon dioxide had been released. “This meant that there was metabolic activity, that is, that in some way there was life”, explains Iván López, historian of science, on the tape.
That was historic, a world milestone. NASA got the go-ahead from the US Government to release the good news to the press. They were almost a step away from saying that there was life on Mars. But then Oró intervened. “He raised his hand and asked if it had been analyzed properly, if the mechanisms could not have been generated in any other way,” explains astrophysicist Salvador Ribas. “He remembered – he adds – that there were organic elements that could have been synthesized in the laboratory without the need for a life to have created them”.
Oró’s intervention forced a reanalysis that ended up concluding that it was much more likely that the metabolic activity had as its origin other natural mechanisms unrelated to possible life on Mars. “His intervention was crucial to prevent NASA from making a mistake in such an important mission”, underlines Ribas. “It also denotes – he adds – its credibility”. It is very difficult to stop the machine when everything is ready to make an announcement of this magnitude.
“I think his attitude was the right one”, states the biochemist Juli Peretó in the documentary. “Before giving an extraordinary explanation, he looked for ordinary explanations”. Astrobiologist Carlos Briones has a similar opinion: “Extraordinary results require extraordinary evidence”.
The documentary captures a moment in which Oró himself, in a televised interview, excitedly explains the “most important” moment of his life. It was Christmas Eve 1959, when he achieved a milestone: the synthesis of adenine from hydrogen cyanide. Oró strongly agreed with Darwin’s maxim that the most complex compounds came from the simplest ones. And that’s what he demonstrated that Christmas 64 years ago. “When I saw it, I couldn’t believe it. I wondered: ‘How is it possible for nature, from such a toxic product, to create one so important for life?'”.
