The Origin of Life? – Science persists in asking…
Galileo Before the Holy Office Joseph Nicolas Robert-Fleury
When our Renaissance heroes Galileo, Copernicus, and Tycho Brahe cogitated the celestial sphere and removed humanity from the centre of the physical universe, they must have developed cricks in their necks – regularly looking over their shoulders for the ever-watchful ecclesiastical authorities who brutally insisted on maintaining the status quo. Six hundred years later we still want to understand the unknown and persist in our curiosity, although the consequences of our enquiry are not usually as dire as those faced by Copernicus. We continue to ask questions and one of these, for which there are still few answers, is ‘how did life begin?’. Embedded in a question like this are metaphysical quandaries that consider consciousness and our humanity; one wonders whether such attributes will ever enter the realm of the empirical. However, science can attempt to deal with explicitly empirical parts of the question, such as ‘how might organic molecules, that are critical to functioning cells, have formed on the ancient earth?’.
The first article on this thorny topic dealt with an iconic set of chemical experiments conducted in the early 1950s. This post takes these experiments incrementally further.
However…