Scientists Are Cracking the Primordial Soup Mystery 278
derekmead writes "Scientists have had a basic understanding of how life first popped up on Earth for a while. The so-called 'primordial soup' was sitting around, stagnant but containing the basic building blocks of life. Then something happened and we ended up with life. It's that 'something' that has been the sticking point for scientists, but new research from a team of scientists at the University of Leeds has started to shed light on the mystery, explaining just how objects from space might have kindled the reaction that sparked life on Earth. It's generally accepted that space rocks played an important role in life's genesis on Earth. Meteorites bombarding the planet early in its history delivered some of the necessary materials for life but none brought life as we know it. How inanimate rocks transformed into the building blocks of life has been a mystery. But this latest research suggests an answer. If meteorites containing phosphorus landed in the hot, acidic pools that surrounded young volcanoes on the early Earth, there could have been a reaction that produced a chemical similar one that's found in all living cells and is vital in producing the energy that makes something alive."
Re:Here we go again...... (Score:4, Informative)
Oh yeah it does, if we can figure out how life was created, we can create more life. And THAT opens the door to a lot.....
Not necessarily. If we discover that the "secret mechanism" to creating life is spending a few billion years randomly slamming every combination of rocks and sludge together until you get the particular combination of self-replicating macromolecules that lead to all later life, then you haven't helped lab efforts much. The mechanism might be reliably reproducible: e.g., "every time you mix a sludge of precursors X, Y, Z, bake for 15 minutes at 325F, then zap with lightning, you'll get life." On the other hand, it might be a hard-to-reproduce fluke: e.g., "once in a trillion times you mix a sludge of precursors X, Y, Z, bake for 15 minutes at 325F, then zap with lightning, you'll get life; usually, you just get foul-smelling goop."
Re:Exotic minerals from space rocks (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Here we go again...... (Score:3, Informative)
We do; they just aren't all alive at the same time. As you go backward into the past, the genotypes of humans and other apes (e.g. chimpanzees) gradually converge, until several million years ago, they are the same. Taken as a whole, there HAS been a continuous spectrum of creatures from humans to apes. (And traced far back enough, between all living things.) It staggers me that people find this difficult to understand.
Re:Here we go again...... (Score:5, Informative)
Actually we're already at the threshold of creating life in any form we wish - I believe it was a year or so ago that someone successfully implanted a fully synthetic genome into a bacteria...
That's the impression you'd get from skimming the headlines. I fear it's a bit sensationalist.
The experiment you refer to involved a synthesized -copy- of an existing organism's genome. An impressive feat, but not quite "creating life in any form we wish."
We've learned to copy-and-paste DNA. Right now that's about all we can do. Protein-folding is a hard problem, so we can't easily predict what a given DNA sequence will do, let alone invent new sequences. We can do a bit of remixing, copying a gene from here to there, but we can't create new genes yet.
We'll get there, I don't doubt that. But at this stage, our "synthetic genome" is just a xerox copy.
Informative link about the "synthetic genome" experiment: http://www.jcvi.org/cms/research/%20projects/synthetic-bacterial-genome/press-release/ [jcvi.org]