Nobody Knows How Life Started

Here is a question that sounds simple but has confounded the brightest minds on the planet for over 70 years: how did life start?

Not how did life evolve — that is a different question. How did the very first living cell arise from non-living chemistry? How did inert molecules become alive?

Nobody knows.

In 1953, Stanley Miller and Harold Urey ran a famous experiment. They simulated what they believed was Earth's early atmosphere, applied electrical discharge, and produced some amino acids — the building blocks of proteins.

Headlines declared victory. "Life created in a lab!" Textbooks still feature this experiment.

But here is what is often left out:

• They produced amino acids, not life. That is like claiming you built a house because you found some bricks in a field.
• The atmospheric composition they used was almost certainly wrong — the early Earth likely had a different gas mixture that does not produce amino acids as readily.
• Even the amino acids they obtained were a mix of types that life does not use (life exclusively uses left-handed amino acids; Miller produced both).

More than 70 years later, nobody has come remotely close to creating a living cell from scratch.

The simplest living cell is incomprehensibly complex. Even the most basic bacteria require:

• DNA or RNA to store genetic information
• to read and execute that information