Although there are only a handful of people who would call themselves origins-of-life researchers, the field is undergoing a renaissance, with a wide array of disciplines, such as radio astronomy, planetary science, molecular biology, and biochemistry, converging to make advances. Work on AIDS, on microbes living near hydrothermal ocean vents, and on the composition of interstellar gases are all contributing to answering questions about the origin of life. Molecular biology, the darling of today's biological sciences, is leading the pack.
Molecular biologists Sidney Altman at Yale University and Thomas Cech at the University of Colorado are not origins-of-life researchers, but their work has largely been responsible for retrieving this field from the outer reaches of science. They won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1989 for their finding that RNA can cut, splice, and assemble itself. This has created an origins-of-life revival by demonstrating that an RNA-only world may have ...
