In 1971 the American organic chemist Cyril Ponnamperuma, who was born in Sri Lanka, moved to the University of Maryland at College Park from NASA-Ames Research Centre. He was appointed Professor of Chemistry and established the Laboratory of Chemical Evolution (LCE) becoming its Director. This laboratory soon developed into a center of excellence for research on chemical and biological evolution. The work ranged from planetary science to biochemistry to geochemistry to physical chemistry. His research group was always numerous and international, with 15 to 20 scientists or technicians from a wide geographical distribution.

In this setting he gathered scientists from all over the world in his traditional College Park Colloquium on Chemical Evolution. According to Rafael Navarro Gonzalez [1], "since 1992 this series of conferences were relocated in Italy and named Conference on Chemical Evolution and the Origin of Life, which were organized by Ponnamperuma, Abdus Salam and Julian Chela-Flores".

The organization of the First Conference began in February 1991. The event itself was held from 26 till 30 October 1992 [2]. Ponnamperuma coordinated these conferences till the end of his life in 1994, in collaboration with Chela-Flores.

We were very fortunate for two significant events: firstly, the French organic chemist and planetary scientist, François Raulin, one of the visitors of the LCE Laboratory, agreed to co-direct the Fourth Conference on Chemical Evolution and the Origin of Life with Chela-Flores, and continued to do so till the year 2003. Secondly, the American planetary scientist Tobias Owen became a co-director of these academic events for the Sixth and Seventh Conferences [3, 4].

The tradition of College Park colloquia was transferred in the form of a training event to Caracas at the Convention Center of the Instituto de Estudios Avanzados (Fundacion IDEA, November-December 1999). The same spirit that Cyril Ponnamperuma imprinted to the College Park Colloquia was preserved in the Caracas School of Astrobiology with the presence of two pioneers of the origin of life studies: the Spanish organic chemist and planetary scientist Juan Oro, and the American astronomer Frank Drake, President of the SETI Institute, who initiated the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) by means of radio astronomy [5].

The singular experience of the Chemical Evolution Series of colloquia, conferences and advanced school has provided a unique environment among the wide spectrum of academic events on the subject that is still known as either exobiology, bioastronomy, or more frequently 'astrobiology'. The chemical evolution tradition of College Park and Trieste attracted numerous scientists. The host institutions were firstly, the Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics that was founded in 1964 by the Nobel Laureate Salam and his Italian colleagues led by Paolo Budinich. Secondly, the Instituto de Estudios Avanzados (IDEA) in Caracas supported these activities. IDEA was founded in 1980 by the neuroscientist Raimundo Villegas, at that time the Minister of Science of Venezuela, and some of his colleagues: the hydrologist Ignacio Rodriguez Iturbe, the researcher in the medical sciences Antonio Sanabria, and Chela-Flores.

The Seventh Conference on Chemical Evolution and the Origin of Life focused on the 50th anniversary of the seminal experiment of Stanley Miller.Over 100 scientists joined Professor Miller in the recollections of one of the most exciting moments in the development of astrobiology [6].

The Conferences on Chemical Evolution and the Origin of Life had the participation, not only of Salam and Ponnamperuma, but also pioneers in the origin-of-life studies, Drake, Sidney Fox, Miller and Oró. Others who were present were: Gustav Arrhenius, Vladik Avetisov, Harrick and Marghareta Baltscheffsky, Laurence Barron, Francesco Bertola, André Brack, Graham Cairns-Smith, Giorgio Careri, Mohindra Chadha, David Cline, Marcello Coradini, John Corliss, Cristiano Cosmovici, George Coyne, Paul Davies, Donald De Vincenzi, Steven J. Dick, Klaus Dose, Enzo Gallori, Giancarlo Genta, Georgi Gladyshev, Vitali Goldanskii, J. Mayo Greenberg, Kaoru Harada, Jean Heidmann, Gerda Horneck, Yoji Ishikawa, Jamal Islam, Michael Ivanov, Torrence Johnson, Otto Kandler, Lajos Keszthelyi, Richard D. Keynes, Kensei Kobayashi, Mikhail Kritsky, Igor Kulaev, Narendra Kumar, Doron Lancet, Antonio Lazcano, Guillermo Lemarchand, Alexandra MacDermott, Claudio Maccone, Koichiro Matsuno, Clifford Matthews, Michel Mayor,Christopher McKay, David McKay, Juan Perez Mercader, Michael Meyer, Stenlio Montebugnoli, Stephen Moorbath, Navarro-González, Alicia Negrón-Mendoza, Marc Ollivier, Tahiro Oshima, Cynthia Phillips, Daniel Prieur, Martino Rizzotti, Robert John Russell, Takeshi Saito, Manfred Schidlowski, J. William Schopf, Jean Schneider, Peter Schuster, Joseph Seckbach, Everett Shock, Jill Tarter, Margaret Turnbull, Peter D. Ward, Wang Wenqing, Frances Westall, Yu-Fen Zhao and many others.

References

1. Navarro Gonzalez, R. (1998) In Memoriam Cyril Andrew Ponnamperuma, Origins of Life and Evolution of the Biosphere 28, pp. 105-108.

2. Ponnamperuma, C. and Chela-Flores, J. (1993). Chemical Evolution: Origin of Life. A. Deepak Publishing, Vol. 135: Hampton, Virginia, USA. http://www.stcnet.com/adpub/135.html

3. Chela-Flores, J., Owen, T. and Raulin, F. (2001). The First Steps of Life in the Universe. Kluwer Academic Publishers: Dordrecht, The Netherlands.
http://www.wkap.nl/book.htm/1-4020-0077-4

4. Seckbach, J.; Chela-Flores, J.; Owen, T.; Raulin, F. (eds.) (2004) Life in the Universe
From the Miller Experiment to the Search for Life on Other Worlds Series: Cellular Origin, Life in Extreme Habitats and Astrobiology, Vol. 7, 387 p.,
Softcover ISBN: 1-4020-3093-2
Hardcover ISBN: 1-4020-2371-5
http://www.springeronline.com/sgw/cda/frontpage/0,11855,5-198-72-36021312-0,00.html

5. Chela-Flores, J., Lemarchand, G.A. and Oro, J. (2000). Astrobiology: Origins from the Big Bang to Civilisation. Kluwer Academic Publishers: Dordrecht, The Netherlands.
http://www.wkap.nl/prod/b/0-7923-6587-9

6. Chela-Flores, J. (2004) The New Science of Astrobiology From Genesis of the Living Cell to Evolution of Intelligent Behavior in the Universe. Series : Cellular Origin, Life in Extreme Habitats and Astrobiology , Band 3 Kluwer Academic Publishers: Dordrecht, The Netherlands, 251 p., Softcover edition of the 2001 book, ISBN: 1-4020-2229-8
http://www.springeronline.com/sgw/cda/frontpage/0,11855,5-198-72-33595256-0,00.html