Top-down and bottom-up quests: the mystery of life's origin

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Current investigators of efforts toward synthetic life forms find themselves dealing with the same dilemmas that face the origin-of-life researchers. The efforts to modify life have made evident the need for intelligence, planning and control that didn't exist on early Earth.

The Prebiotic Soup

p129 Jeffrey Bada and Antonio Lacazano were colleagues of Miller, and they along with Noam Lahav in his book Biogenesis conclude that the "prebiotic soup" was not there.

The Replicator-First Scenario

p168 Box. Shapiro examines homopolymer problem and comes to the conclusion that it devastates the replicator-first hypothesis.

Metabolism-First Scenarios

Challenges to the RNA World

p161 "I appreciate the origin-of-life community, not only for its remarkable achievements but also for its integrity in widely acknowledging problems with the prebiotic production of nucleases, ribose, and polyphosphates. In fact, in the opening plenary lecture of ISSOL '02, distinguished scholar Leslie Orgel had the courage to say, 'It would be a miracle if a strand of RNA ever appeared on the primitive Earth.' As a preface to this comment, Orgel remarked, 'I hope no creationists are in the audience.'"