Description

The surrounding world can be divided into two parts: alive and in-animate. What makes the difference is the subtle reactivity of living systems. Thedifference is so great that it is reasonable to suppose that what underlies life is aspecific physical state, âthe living stateâ.   Living systems are built mainly of nucleic acids and proteins, The former arethe guardians OFthe basic blueprint while the business of life is carried on by pro-teins. Proteins thus have to share the subtle reactivity of Living systems. A cfosed-shell protein molecule, however, has no electronic mobility, and has but a lowchemical reactivity. Its orbitals are occupied by electron pairs which are held firm-ly. The situation can be changed by taking single electrons out of the system, Thisunpairs electrons, leaves half-occupied orbitafs with positive electron holes, mak-ing the molecules into highly reactive paramagnetic free radicals, The reactivity ofthe system depends on the degree of its electronjc desaturation. Electrons can betaken out of protem molecules by âelectron acceptorsâ in âcharge transferâ.   When life began, our globe was covered by dense water vapour. There was nolight and no free oxygen. Electron acceptors could be made out of trioses by con-centrating their carbon atoms as carbonyls at one end of the molecule. Theresulting methylglyoxat          is a weak acceptor        which made a low level of developmentpossible. When light appeared, free oxygen was generated by the energy ofphotons.     Oxygen       is a strong   electron     acceptor.   Its appearance      opened      the way     tothe present     tevel   of development.          The   transfer  of electrons    from    protein     to o~y-gen  is effected      by a compler       chemical      mechanism      which   involves    ascorbic      acid,Please contribute back by OCRing and Spellcheck/Proofreading this book. I recommend ABBYY Finereader 11 (or similar) for doing this work in a relatively easy way. If you plan to do that please leave a comment here so the effort won’t be duplicated by others. Please upload back the final pdf. Thank you.Please note that the high quality scan images are posted here for a specific purpose – to make it easy to OCR/spellcheck the book and not spend 100 hours doing that from a crappy, lossy compressed pdfs that are sometimes posted here. So please don’t waste your time asking why this is not a pdf file. Instead please contribute a few hours of your time and OCR and proofread the posted book. Thank you.