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The Conundrum of Life's Origin
How to solve biology’s chicken-or-egg dilemma
But scientists had no choice once molecular biologist Sidney Altman and chemist Thomas Cech made the stunning (and Nobel Prize-winning) discovery in the early 1980s that RNA could indeed act as an enzyme—and potentially start up its own replication. It is now clear that to have a chance at solving this mystery—as well as whether the origin of life was inevitable or a fluke —scientists will have to imagine what strange landscapes on Earth could have given birth to the building blocks of RNA, proteins, and cell membranes. These advances in prebiotic chemistry, together with our growing understanding of the early Earth environments that could have fostered this chemistry—like soda lakes or impact crater lakes—are bringing us closer to a picture of how life itself might have emerged on the surface of our newly formed planet.
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