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Concept
Leslie Orgel
Summary
Leslie Eleazer Orgel FRS (12 January 1927 – 27 October 2007) was a British chemist. He is known for his theories on the origin of life.
Leslie Orgel was born in London, England, on . He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in chemistry with first-class honours from the University of Oxford in 1948. In 1951 he was elected a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford and in 1953 was awarded his PhD in chemistry.
Orgel started his career as a theoretical inorganic chemist and continued his studies in this field at Oxford, the California Institute of Technology , and the University of Chicago.
Together with Sydney Brenner, Jack Dunitz, Dorothy Hodgkin, and Beryl M. Oughton he was one of the first people in April 1953 to see the model of the structure of DNA, constructed by Francis Crick and James Watson, at the time he and the other scientists were working at Oxford University's Chemistry Department. According to the late Dr. Beryl Oughton, later Rimmer, they all travelled together in two cars once Dorothy Hodgkin announced to them that they were off to Cambridge to see the model of the structure of DNA. All were impressed by the new DNA model, especially Brenner who subsequently worked with Crick; Orgel himself also worked with Crick at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.
In 1955 he joined the chemistry department at Cambridge University. There he did work in transition metal chemistry and ligand field theory, published several peer-reviewed journal articles, and wrote a textbook entitled Transition Metal Chemistry: Ligand Field Theory (1960). He developed the Orgel diagram showing the energies of electronic terms in transition metal complexes.
Orgel formulated his protein-translation error-catastrophe theory of aging in 1963, (prior to the use of the term by Manfred Eigen for mutational error catastrophe) which has since been experimentally challenged.
In 1964, Orgel was appointed senior fellow and research professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, where he directed the Chemical Evolution Laboratory.
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