Trinks operates his microscope
at an improvised desk.
Image courtesy of Hauke Trinks
With a few crates of supplies and two sled dogs, Trinks and his partner, Marie Tieche, hunkered down in a cabin on Nordaustland for 13 months. Each morning they monitored the temperature of the ice and prepared the day’s experiments. To study the networks of liquid pockets, Trinks injected dyes into the ice and watched through a microscope as they spread.
Winter deepened, 24-hour darkness descended, and the mercury plummeted to –20°F. Trinks continued his experiments, sometimes banging pans together to chase polar bears away. Once a walrus lunged up through the ice and dragged several of Trinks’s instruments into the ocean.
He built a makeshift lab table from planks of wood and discarded gasoline cans. He examined slices of sea ice under the microscope, his hood pulled tight around his eyes. Turning a knob with a gloved hand, he nudged a metal electrode nearly as fine as a red blood cell closer to an ice crystal. The needle on his voltmeter jerked sideways, registering a sharp drop in voltage on the crystal’s surface—evidence of a microscopic electric field that might arrange and orient molecules on the ice’s surface.
By the time Trinks returned to Hamburg in 2003, he had formulated a theory that ice was doing much more than just concentrating chemicals. The ice surface is a checkerboard of positive and negative charges; he imagined those charges grabbing individual nucleobases and stacking them like Pringles in a can, helping them coalesce into a chain of RNA. “The surface layer between ice and liquid is very complicated,” he says. “There is strong bonding between the surface of the ice and the liquid. Those bondings are important for producing long organic chains like RNA.”
At a lecture in Hamburg in 2003, Trinks met up with chemist Christof Biebricher, who was studying how the first RNA chains could have formed in the absence of the enzymes that guide their formation in living cells. Trinks approached Biebricher with his sea ice theory, but to Biebricher, the experiments to test it sounded messy—more like a margarita recipe than a serious scientific investigation. “Chemists,” says Biebricher, “do not like heterogeneous substances like ice.” But Trinks convinced him to try it in his laboratory at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, Germany.
Biebricher sealed small amounts of RNA nucleobases—adenine, cytosine, guanine—with artificial seawater into thumb-size plastic tubes and froze them. After a year, he thawed the tubes and analyzed them for chains of RNA.
For decades researchers had tried to coax RNA chains to form under all sorts of conditions without using enzymes; the longest chain formed, which Orgel accomplished in 1982, consisted of about 40 nucleobases. So when Biebricher analyzed his own samples, he was amazed to see RNA molecules up to 400 bases long. In newer, unpublished experiments he says he has observed RNA molecules 700 bases long. Biebricher’s results are so fantastic that some colleagues have wondered whether accidental contamination played a role. Orgel defended the work. “It’s a remarkable result,” he said. “It’s so remarkable that everyone wants better evidence than they would for an unremarkable result. But I think it’s right.”
Biebricher had loaded the deck somewhat, because he wasn’t growing RNA chains from nothing. Before he froze his samples, he added an RNA template—a single-strand chain of RNA that guides the formation of a new strand of RNA. As that new RNA strand grows, it adheres to the template like one half of a zipper to the other. This must be how the first genes, made of RNA, would have copied themselves. But the first step was the formation of the original RNA molecule that served as a template, and how that step happened remains a mystery.
Ice may prove the crucial ingredient here, too. Deamer and his former student Pierre-Alain Monnard (now at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico) have run experiments frozen at 0°F for a month, without the aid of templates. In those relatively brief experiments they already see RNA molecules up to 30 bases long, at least as long as other researchers have seen in similar experiments without ice.
