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Contributors SHERWOOD CHANG, SETI INSTITUTE, MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIFORNIA Sherwood Chang, an international leader in cosmochemistry and studies of the origin of life, has been a friend and colleague of Alan Schwartz (coauthor of chapter 2) for many years, an association dating from the late 1960s when they shared laboratory facilities at NASA’s Ames Research Center south of San Francisco. Following completion of his undergraduate studies at Harvard (A. B. in chemistry, 1962), receipt of his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin (in organic chemistry, 1966), and postdoctoral research at Stanford University, Dr. Chang joined the staff at NASA–Ames in 1967, first as a Staff Scientist and Principal Investigator, then as Chief of the Exobiology Branch, a position he filled with great distinction from 1985 to 1998. Currently, he is formally affiliated with the SETI Institute in northern California, a not-for-profit research organization focusing on the search for extraterrestrial life. For his contributions in cosmochemistry, geochemistry, and lunar and planetary science, Dr. Chang was awarded NASA’s Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal, two NASA Special Achievement Awards, the H. Julian Allen Award, and a prestigious Dryden Fellowship. From 1986 through 1993, he served as First Vice President of the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life, the worldwide membership of which elected him an ISSOL Fellow in 1999. JAMES P. FERRIS, RENSSELAER POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE, TROY, NEW YORK James P. Ferris is the 1996 recipient of ISSOL’s A. I. Oparin Medal, awarded for his masterful studies of how small building-block molecules (monomers) in the primordial environment could have linked to form long chainlike aggregates (polymers), compounds such as RNA and proteins on which life depends. He is currently a Research Professor and Director of the New York Center for Studies 181 on the Origin of Life (a NASA NSCORT) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, whose faculty he joined in 1967. Trained in chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania (B. S., 1954) and Indiana University (Ph.D., 1958), he was a member of the Department of Chemistry at Florida State University and a Research Scientist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in southern California. He has been a Visiting Research Scientist at the State University of New York, Albany; the Marine Biology Laboratories, Woods Hole, Massachusetts; the Salk Institute for Biological Studies; the NASA Ames Research Center, California; and the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, Laboratory of Organic Chemistry, Zürich, Switzerland. A past president of ISSOL, he was a long-term (1982–1999) editor of the Society’s journal, Origins of Life and Evolution of the Biosphere, helping to achieve its current international preeminence. ANTONIO LAZCANO, AUTONOMOUS NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, MEXICO CITY Antonio Lazcano, a close colleague and long-time friend of Stanley Miller (coauthor of chapter 3), is among the best known and most respected of all modern Mexican biologists. Trained both as an undergraduate and graduate student at Mexico’s Autonomous National University in Mexico City, he is a recipient of that university’s most prized accolade—the title of Distinguished Professor. Recipient of the National University’s Gold Medal of Biological Research, he has also received an impressive series of other prestigious awards for his contributions to science, scientific journalism, and teaching. An academic committed to public education, Professor Lazcano is the author of several books including The Miraculous Bacteria, a tour de force on microbial evolution; the Spark of Life, a layperson-level exploration of how life on Earth began; and a national bestseller (more than 350,000 copies), The Origin of Life. An internationally recognized scholar, he has been a Professor-in Residence or Visiting Scientist at universities and research institutes in France, Spain, Cuba, Switzerland, Russia, and the United States. Currently, the First Vice President of the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life, Professor Lazcano focuses his research on the deepest branches of the Universal Tree of Life and the origin and earliest evolution of the energy-yielding metabolic pathways of living systems. STANLEY L. MILLER, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO Stanley L. Miller, ISSOL’s 1983 A. I. Oparin medalist, is legendary for his fundamental contributions to understanding life’s beginnings—contributions that are now recounted in textbooks worldwide. An early pathfinder in origin-of-life research, he was the first to show, in experiments plausibly simulating pre-life Earth conditions, that amino acids and other building blocks of life could have been formed in the absence of living systems...

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