In 1953 a University of Chicago graduate student, Stanley Miller, shot electric sparks into an apparatus that circulated water, methane, ammonia, and hydrogen in a closed system. After a week, he identified organic compounds, including amino acids, in the turbid red liquid that resulted.1 The experiment galvanized research into life's origins. Yet for decades afterward, the work has proceeded in fits and starts, as scientists struggled to explain how building-block molecules, scattered throughout a "primordial soup" of the ancient seas, might have gathered themselves into something resembling life.
Fifty years later, researchers see new reasons for optimism. In some ways having moved past building blocks, they have created, under simulated assumed primordial conditions, larger structures and processes akin to those that characterize cells, including simple cell membranes, bits of possible early metabolisms, and crude RNA catalysts. Some investigators even suggest that the creation of artificial cells might be within reach.
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