ANDRZEJ KRAUZEMost cultures have creation myths looking back to a time before life existed, assuaging a universal longing to know from whence we and our world came.
Will scientists ever be able to write a complete origin-of-life story, one based on incontrovertible facts? The opening chapter would require a journey way back in time to when Earth formed some 4.5 billion years ago, oxygenless, pocked with spewing volcanoes, bombarded with asteroids. Yet, somehow life appeared on this planet. Chemistry begat biology. Cells formed from a soup of simple molecules. By 3.5 billion years ago, microbes, perhaps similar to contemporary organisms, existed on Earth. How did that happen? How fast? And where?
A host of researchers from myriad disciplines—geologists, microbiologists, geneticists, astrobiologists, computational biologists, biochemists, and synthetic biologists—are adding fascinating details to the story. This issue of The Scientist offers a glimpse of some of the most current origin-of-life science, from new research ...
