It's Alive! It's Alive!

Shades of Dr. Frankenstein...

Wired Magazine has a report by Brandon Keim entitled "Life’s First Spark Re-Created in the Laboratory". Here's the key bit:

RNA is now found in living cells, where it carries information between genes and protein-manufacturing cellular components. Scientists think RNA existed early in Earth’s history, providing a necessary intermediate platform between pre-biotic chemicals and DNA, its double-stranded, more-stable descendant.

However, though researchers have been able to show how RNA’s component molecules, called ribonucleotides, could assemble into RNA, their many attempts to synthesize these ribonucleotides have failed. No matter how they combined the ingredients — a sugar, a phosphate, and one of four different nitrogenous molecules, or nucleobases — ribonucleotides just wouldn’t form.

Sutherland’s team took a different approach in what Harvard molecular biologist Jack Szostak called a “synthetic tour de force” in an accompanying commentary in Nature.

“By changing the way we mix the ingredients together, we managed to make ribonucleotides,” said Sutherland. “The chemistry works very effectively from simple precursors, and the conditions required are not distinct from what one might imagine took place on the early Earth.”


Like other would-be nucleotide synthesizers, Sutherland’s team included phosphate in their mix, but rather than adding it to sugars and nucleobases, they started with an array of even simpler molecules that were probably also in Earth’s primordial ooze.

They mixed the molecules in water, heated the solution, then allowed it to evaporate, leaving behind a residue of hybrid, half-sugar, half-nucleobase molecules. To this residue they again added water, heated it, allowed it evaporate, and then irradiated it.

At each stage of the cycle, the resulting molecules were more complex. At the final stage, Sutherland’s team added phosphate. “Remarkably, it transformed into the ribonucleotide!” said Sutherland.

According to Sutherland, these laboratory conditions resembled those of the life-originating “warm little pond” hypothesized by Charles Darwin if the pond “evaporated, got heated, and then it rained and the sun shone.”

The original experiments go back to 1952 with Stanley Miller and Harold Urey and were able to create some amino acids (building blocks of life's proteins). But how life self-organized remained elusive. In 1986 Walter Gilbert hypotesized that life did not start with DNA but with RNA since RNA can both hold a code as well as build more molecules.

With the above research result, this substantiates down the RNA World thesis of Gilbert by showing how the initial RNA was created. It looks like we really do understand how life started.

We've come a long way from the pseudo-science of Hollywood:



The truth is real science is hard work, lots of in-the-trenches collaboration and even generations of efforts-layered-on-efforts to build great knowledge. It is easy to generate phoney "drama". It is hard to actually advance knowledge.