Summary. Recent findings on the presence of water on Mars strongly suggest that there existed a period of chemical evolution, eventually leading to life processes on primitive Mars. It is quite likely that the process of chemical evolution might have been suppressed or any living organism formed could have become extinct, in due course of time on Mars, because of adverse conditions. The presence of water for the survival of living organisms and the presence of gray hematite, originated under aqueous conditions, have led us to investigate on the possible role of hematite in the chemical evolution on Mars. Our observations suggest that iron oxide hydroxide (FeOOH), a precursor of hematite, has very high binding affinity towards ribose nucleotides (building blocks of RNA) than the hematite itself. This would mean that during the process of hematite formation,especially through a probable process of hydrolysis of Fe3+ by aqueous ammonia, precursors of hematite might had played a significant role in the processes leading to chemical evolution and possibly origin of life on Mars.

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(*) Professor Kamaluddin is at the Department of Chemistry, Indian Institute of Technology at Roorkee, India. His area of research is chemistry especially, chemical evolution and the origin of life. In 1974 he obtained his Ph. D. degree in Chemistry from AMU University in Aligarh, India. The subject of his thesis was Oxidation kinetics of amino acids. He has been a full professor since 1996. He is a member of several international societies, including ISSOL, the International Astrobiology Society.

Since the year 2002 he is a Senior Associate at The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics. He has held postdoctoral fellowships at Mitsubishi-Kasei Institute of Life Sciences in Tokyo (1977- 1978), where he worked with Professor Fujio Egami and at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York (1987- 1989), where he worked with Professor James Ferris.

He has published numerous research papers in national and international journals. In addition, he has supervised many theses at the master and Ph.D. levels and has participated in a large number of national and international conferences.