From Tom Nash
One snag with the proposal that micelles – balls of lipids – facilitated the origin of life is that the long surfactant carbon chains are of biological origin themselves (27 September, p 22).
However, micelles are interesting as crude models of life – they form, live for a certain time and then die. It used to be thought that they always form and break down very rapidly – not much use then as supports for any reaction between absorbed prebiotic molecules. This is true for surfactants made of carbon-12 but certainly not for the common ones, made of carbon-16. Over 40 years ago, I showed that the average lifetime of a carbon-16 micelle is around an hour.
Sherborne, Dorset, UK
