The New York Times has an article attempting to plot our progress to date in working out the puzzle of life’s origins on Earth.
So little fossil evidence has been found to explain the origins of life on Earth that scientists, in order to figure out how life may have begun, are taking the approach of attempting to recreate the conditions that might make this spontaneous synthesis of living cells possible. But there are many theories as to what these conditions might have been.
The three researchers, Jack W. Szostak, David P. Bartel and P. Luigi Luisi, published a somewhat adventurous manifesto in Nature in 2001, declaring that the way to make a synthetic cell was to get a protocell and a genetic molecule to grow and divide in parallel, with the molecules being encapsulated in the cell. If the molecules gave the cell a survival advantage over other cells, the outcome would be “a sustainable, autonomously replicating system, capable of Darwinian evolution,” they wrote.
“It would be truly alive,” they added.