[5] In 1940s and 1950s, Oparin supported the theories of Trofim Lysenko and Olga Lepeshinskaya, who made claims about "the origin of cells from noncellular matter".

[10] Oparin became Hero of Socialist Labour in 1969, received the Lenin Prize in 1974, and was awarded the Lomonosov Gold Medal in 1979 "for outstanding achievements in biochemistry".

Although Oparin's started out reviewing various panspermia theories, including those of Hermann von Helmholtz and William Thomson (Lord Kelvin),[4] he was primarily interested in how life began.

As early as 1922,[citation needed] he asserted that: Oparin outlined a way he thought that basic organic chemicals might have formed into microscopic localized systems, from which primitive living things could have developed.

He cited work done by de Jong and Sidney W. Fox on coacervates and research by others, including himself, into organic chemicals which, in solution, might spontaneously form droplets and layers.

Oparin suggested that different types of coacervates could have formed in the Earth's primordial ocean and been subject to a selection process that led, eventually, to life.

The Miller–Urey experiment[11] introduced heat (to provide reflux) and electrical energy (sparks, to simulate lightning) into a mixture of several simple components that would be present in a reducing atmosphere.