The Origins of Life: Not as Hard as It Looks?

Let’s go back in time to somewhere around four billion years ago, when the chemistry of the early Earth was becoming more complex and ultimately giving rise to biology. This is a hard thing to study for many reasons, including the fact that we have no actual geological samples of the surface of our planet when it was young. As a result, a lot of what I’m going to discuss is a mix of theory and experiments that provides us with ideas about how things might have happened. What we can do is test our ideas and figure out what doesn’t work, and from the remainder, try to figure out what processes are the most plausible. What we’re left with is a possible path, or perhaps several possible paths leading from chemistry to biology. Once discovered, the individual steps seem straightforward. Why then has progress been so slow? Again and again, we have seen that advances result from overcoming some preconception, some deeply ingrained idea about how things ought to work, which turns out not to be true. It is overcoming those deeply ingrained prejudices that is really essential for the progress of science. What I’d like to do here is to present a personal perspective on a series of advances in my field, the chemistry of the origins of life.