Explainer
Did Life Begin in an RNA World?
The earliest life forms may have emerged from self-copying RNA.
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Special series
A New Era for the Dawn of Life
Creative, interdisciplinary, and bold, the study of the origins of life has entered a new age.
For decades, scientists have fought openly about how life first got started more than 4 billion years ago. The research atmosphere was hostile and divided, each faction occupying its own world built on which type of molecule they believed was the progenitor of life on Earth, to the exclusion of all others.
But discoveries in prebiotic chemistry have challenged the single-molecule approach and opened an opportunity to bring bold ideas to humanity’s oldest question. Now, a new wave of researchers from across chemistry and biology are taking inspiration from life as we know it to reimagine what could have happened at the very beginning.
They’re pressing beyond what can be definitively known to intelligently speculate about how a self-replicating, self-sustaining, evolving system could have possibly emerged from simple chemistry so long ago — and how it could happen elsewhere in the cosmos.
Feature
The Evolving Story
of How Chemistry
Became Biology
After decades of bickering about which molecules came first, a new generation of scientists is rethinking what life was, is, and could be.
Go to articleExplore three leading theories on early life origins.
Explainer
The Case for a Bubble at Life’s Beginning
An enclosed lipid container gave chemistry a place to gather.
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Explainer
How a Metabolic Spark Could Have Jump-Started Life
Energetic pathways that make and break complex molecules are critical to all life.
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