Full record for carbon-based adj.

Definition	based on the chemistry of carbon compounds: usually describing life, contrasted with that based on other chemical elements
OED requirements	antedating 1939
Earliest cite	Max C. Sheridan, "The Human Equation"
Comment	Fred Galvin submitted a 1960 cite from Alan E. Nourse's "Nine Planets". Fred Galvin submitted a 1966 cite from Roger A. MacGowan and Frederick I. Ordway, III's "Intelligence in the Universe". Fred Galvin submitted a 1961 cite from Isaac Asimov's column in F&SF. Fred Galvin submitted a 1986 cite from John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler's "The Anthropic Cosmological Principle". Fred Galvin submitted a 1992 cite from Steven Levy's "Artifical Life". Fred Galvin submitted a 1957 cite from Grendel Briarton's "Through Time and Space with Ferdinand Feghoot". Fred Galvin submitted a 1947 cite from Emmett McDowell's "Black Silence" Fred Galvin submitted a 1946 cite from an editorial in Astounding, "The Third Great Advance" by "the Editor" (John W. Campbell, Jr?) Fred Galvin submitted a 1939 cite from "The Human Equation" by Max C. Sheridan Suggested by Mike Christie
Last modified	26 July, 2009

Citations for carbon-based adj.

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1947 ‘E. McDowell’ Black Silence in Planet Stories June–Aug. 28/1	Minute aquatic life feeds on the microscopic forms. Small fish, minnows, and other fry, feed on the smaller aquatic creatures. The minnows in turn supply food for larger species. It's a chain. Destroy the first link and you destroy the whole chain. In weeks our waters will be devoid of carbon-based life in any form!
1960 A. E. Nourse Nine Planets 76	The life that we have observed—the life-as-we-know-it-on-Earth—can be defined in terms of these criteria. Carbon is the building stone, an element with a great affinity for multiple kinds of chemical combinations resulting in stable compounds. For carbon-based life, water is the solvent, and as far as we can determine it is the only solvent that could possibly fill the bill. The energy-producing chemical reaction is biochemical, an oxidation-reduction reaction which produces energy in the form of heat. Finally, carbon-based life of this sort demands an abundant supply of oxygen to allow the reaction to proceed.
1960 A. E. Nourse Nine Planets 79	Of course, we have no factual basis on which to speculate that non-carbon-based, non-water-or-colloid-based, nonprotoplasmic life does exist on Mercury any more than we can justifiably assume that it does not. We have every justification, however, in speculating that life, in order to exist, need not be life-as-we-know-it. It need not be carbon-based, it need not conform to any of the conditions required by carbon-based life-as-we-know-it here on Earth.
1961 I. Asimov Not As We Know It in Mag. Fantasy & Sci. Fiction Sept. 91/2	But once you begin with a silicon-oxygen chain, what if the silicon atom's capacity for hooking on to two additional atoms is filled not by more oxygen atoms but by carbon atoms, with, of course, hydrogen atoms attached. Such hybrid molecules, both silicon- and carbon-based, are the ‘silicones’.
1966 R. A. MacGowan & F. I. Ordway Intelligence in Universe 154	As for life as we do not know it, he speculates that it could be based on some noncarbon multivalent element, in a medium that could be gaseous or solid and, of course, on very different compounds. If we ever came across such life, he muses that we might not recognize it as living, or, if we did and it was completely different from carbon-based life, we might have to ‘revise our conception of what life is’.
1993 V. E. Mitchell Windows on Lost World v.60	Perhaps they could get some useful information when the carbon-based polymer fabric penetrated the field.