Scientists in California yesterday reported a major discovery that supports the emerging theory that life on earth began in clay rather than the sea.
The discovery, announced at a symposium, showed that ordinary clay contains two basic properties essential to life: the capacities to store and transfer energy. With such energy, coming from radioactive decay and other sources, the early clays could have acted as ''chemical factories'' for processing inorganic raw materials into the more complex molecules from which the first life arose some four billion years ago.
In their analysis of common ceramic clay, the scientists said they had found evidence that ''mistakes'' made normally and repeatedly in the formation of clay crystals presumably create the conditions by which the material traps energy and holds it for perhaps thousands of years. Such defects in the clay microstructure could also be sites for storing information necessary to direct the chemical reactions and organize the eventual proto-organisms.
Biblical Account Recalled
So, if the theory can be confirmed, it would seem that an accumulation of chemical mistakes led to life on earth. The theory is also evocative of the biblical account of the Creation. In Genesis, it is written, ''And the Lord God formed man of dust of the ground,'' and in common usage this primordial dust is called clay.
The chemists and biologists who made the discovery, however, emphasized that their findings did not prove the clay-life theory but did make it a more reasonable explanation worthy of further research.
The research was conducted by a team of scientists at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Ames Research Center in Mountainview, Calif., where studies of the origin of life have been under way for years in part to learn how to search for life on other worlds. The leader was Dr. Lelia Coyne, a research associate at Ames and also at San Jose State University. She described the findings, the result of research begun in the 1970's, at a symposium held at Ames and in a telephone interview.