Alexander Oparin (Úglich, March 2nd 1894 – April 12th 1980) founded in 1935 the Biochemical Institute RAS. In 1946, he was admitted at the Russian Academy of Sciences. And in 1970, he was elected president of the International Society for the study of origins of life.

Through physical-chemical processes he managed to produce coacervates, a type of protobionts, which are formed by lipid membranes that were obtained during experiments in absence of life, separated of aqueous element by a rudimentary membrane that delimits clearly coacervates from liquid where they float.

Coacervate is a globule formed by a membrane which contents chemical substances inside; as the complexity increases, coacervate gets separated from water by forming an independent unit, although it keeps interacting with its environment.

Coacervate is very selective with the elements it is going to add, by forming more complex and organized structures. Coacervates were formed by methane, ammonia, carbon dioxide and water under conditions of the primitive atmosphere, where large electric shocks could be factors which permitted the formation of coacervates, ancestors of the present unicellular organisms.

After a few decades, Craig Venter (October 14th 1946, Salt Lake City, EE.UU) managed to form the first synthetic cell by introducing synthetic chromosomes of Mycoplasma in a capsule of another bacterium, which acts as a coacervate, and he managed the synthetic cell acted as a living being. On the other hand, synthetic chromosomes were obtained by combining nucleic acids in a chemical environment.

Both processes (Oparin and Venter) represent important advances in the origin of life in the universe, for the apparition from chemical solutions without life, such as living beings which born, grow, reproduce and die. However it is still unknown how coacervates combined to chromosomes in the primitive universe, and the most important we do not know how chromosomes reached the control of the growth of their coacervated capsules.