Marshall reported in late 2020 that when biologist Tibor Gánti died on April 15, 2009, at the age of 75, he was far from a household name. Much of his career had been spent behind the Iron Curtain that divided Europe for decades, hindering an exchange of ideas. But if Gánti’s theories had been more widely known during the communist era, he might now be acclaimed as one of the most innovative biologists of the 20th century. That’s because he devised a model of the simplest possible living organism, which he called the chemoton, that points to an exciting explanation for how life on Earth began.
The origin of life is one of science’s most perplexing mysteries, partly because it is several mysteries in one. What was Earth like when it formed? What gases made up the air? Of the thousands of chemicals that living cells now use, which ones are essential—and when did those must-have substances arise?
Perhaps the hardest question is the simplest: What was the first organism?
For scientists attempting to re-create the spark of life, the chemoton offers an attractive target for experiments. If non-living chemicals can be made to self-assemble into a chemoton, that reveals a pathway by which life could have formed from scratch. Even now, some research groups are edging startlingly close to this model. And for astrobiologists interested in life beyond our planet, the chemoton offers a universal definition of life, one not tied to specific chemicals like DNA, but instead to an overall organizational model. “I think Gánti has thought deeper about the fundamentals of life than anybody else I know,” says biologist Eörs Szathmáry of the Centre for Ecological Research in Tihany, Hungary.
Life’s Beginning
There is no agreed scientific definition of life, though not for want of trying: A 2012 paper identified 123 published definitions. It’s challenging to write one that encompasses all life but that excludes everything non-living with life-like attributes, such as fire and cars. Many definitions say that living things can reproduce. But a rabbit, or a human, or a whale on its own cannot reproduce. In 1994 a NASA committee described life as “a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution.” The word “system” can mean an individual organism, a population, or an ecosystem. That gets around the reproduction problem, but at a cost: vagueness.
Read on ... and look for his Principles of Life online. Amazon shows one for sale (here). Check for authenticity.
Here is the accompanying abstract:
"Beginning with a new essay, "Levels of Life and Death," Tibor Gánti develops three general arguments about the nature of life. In "The Nature of the Living State," Professor Gánti answers Francis Crick's puzzles about "life itself," offering a set of reflections on the parameters of the problems to be solved in origins of life research and, more broadly, in the search for principles governing the living state in general. "The Principle of Life" describes in accessible language Gánti's chief insight about the organization of living systems-his theory of the "chemoton," or chemical automaton.
The simplest chemoton model of the living state consists of three chemically coupled subsystems: an autocatalytic metabolism, a genetic molecule and a membrane. Gánti offers a fresh approach to the ancient problem of "life criteria," articulating a basic philosophy of the units of life applicable to the deepest theoretical considerations of genetics, chemical synthesis, evolutionary biology and the requirements of an "exact theoretical biology."
New essays by Eörs Szathmáry and James Griesemer on the biological and philosophical significance of Gánti's work of thirty years indicate not only the enduring theoretical significance, but also the continuing relevance and heuristic power of Gánti's insights. New endnotes by Szathmáry and Griesemer bring this legacy into dialogue with current thought in biology and philosophy.
Gánti's chemoton model reveals the fundamental importance of chemistry for biology and philosophy. Gánti's technical innovation - cycle stoichiometry - at once captures the fundamental fact that biological systems are organized in cycles and at the same time offers a way to understand what it is to think chemically. Perhaps most fundamentally, Gánti's chemoton model avoids dualistic thinking enforced by the dichotomies of modern biology: germ and soma, gene and character, genotype and phenotype."
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