About the Author, Julie E M McGeoch

Type HEMOGLYCIN on any Browser to learn about a space polymer the author discovered and may soon detect in our galaxy via the JWST.

Here is the wiki article on hemoglycin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemoglycin


The author chose the name FIRST-CHEM for the current chemistry books based on her academic work interest of detecting, isolating and analyzing chemicals that arose at the point the Earth was first forming 5 billion years ago. (https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0103036) (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/maps.12558) (https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.09080)(https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/5.0054860).  The simple abiotic polymer protein termed Hemoglycin has been detected in Allende, Acfer-086, Kaba, Orgueil and Sutters Mill CV3 meteorites.  Via in-fall from space it is also in the first life forms on Earth the Stromatolites. Its analysis occurs at Harvard and 2 synchrotrons for its structure and light absorption, the Argonne National Laboratory (APS) and the Diamond Light Source. The polymer is considered to form 2D and 3D lattice topologies in molecular clouds that accrete smaller molecules. Hemoglycin could be the very basis of accretion because its lattice structure hosts and entraps interacting molecules allowing small space particles to progressively enlarge to form a protoplanetary disk and in time this leads to solar system formation. (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-21043-4), (https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0143945), (https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.17195),

The isotope profiles of the samples are consistent with the molecules forming 5 billion years ago. The D/H ratio in Hemolithin was 26 times terrestrial but equal to that found in comets.  Also 15nitrogen was enhanced to 2 times terrestrial, again typical of comets (https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.06578 ). These 15nitrogen isotope results were established via collaboration between Harvard and scientists in Brno Czechoslovakia and at Bruker, Billerica MA.

Via the new James Web Space Telescope (JWST) in cycle 3 we have applied to time to detect the infrared 6.2micron signal of the polymer in a molecular cloud backlit by 2 bright starts in our solar system (https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.14914).

The most exciting aspect of this is that the signal from the new Magellan Chile telescope which comes on line next year, could detect the polymer as far back as 12.5billion years ago when the constituent elements of the hemoglycin (H, C, N, O) had first formed in the Universe. JWST 6.2micron IR data that at 12.5billion years ago is out of wavelength range for detection due to the red shift.

The point of this research is that it shows which molecules first formed as planets like Earth were forming. This very early chemical knowledge then helps to indicate how on planet Earth life started 4 billion years ago and from what. Today man runs on protein synthesized by the nucleotides DNA/RNA. Those molecules had to form on the early Earth and some of the very simple early polymers that came before DNA/RNA might have played roles in the mechanisms that supported their formation.

FIRST-CHEM Book 1 and 2 are a slight departure from the discipline of polymer research but just as important – society needs more professional and amateur chemists – to manage our planet – the ball is in the court of young adults and their children to become more familiar with chemistry – it can be interesting and some chemical knowledge really enlarges one’s character and makes for wiser life decisions.  Julie McGeoch is in the High Energy Physics Division, Center for Astrophysics, Harvard Smithsonian Observatory, previously for 42 years in the Molecular and Cellular Biology Department at Harvard and before that in Clinical Biochemistry at Oxford University. She often publishes with her physicist husband Malcolm W McGeoch who is the CEO of PLEX Corporation, a company in Fall River MA, making 13nm X-ray sources for the computer industry.