Aleksandr Ivanovich Oparin

2 March 1894 – 21 April 1980

Alexander Ivanovich Oparin (Russian: Александр Иванович Опарин) was a Soviet biochemist notable for his theories about the origin of life and for his book *The Origin of Life*. He also studied the biochemistry of material processing by plants and enzyme reactions in plant cells. He showed that many food production processes were based on biocatalysis and developed the foundations for industrial biochemistry in the USSR. Oparin graduated from the Moscow State University in 1917 and became a professor of biochemistry there in 1927. Many of his early papers were about plant enzymes and their r