* Crossposted from: Philosophy
CNN - Genesis tests suggest entire universe ripe for life - Aug. 10, 1996
Genesis tests suggest entire universe ripe for life 
August 10, 1996
Web posted at:  2:00 p.m. EDT
WASHINGTON (Reuter) -- The discovery this week of possible 
evidence of life on Mars has electrified debate over whether 
the universe is a barren void or a nursery pregnant with life.  
Scientists who have come stunningly close to repeating  
genesis in a test tube say the building blocks for life exist 
everywhere -- the challenge is putting them together. 
"The origin of life is a relatively easy thing and there's   
a wide variety of conditions under which it will take place," 
said Stanley Miller, professor emeritus at the University of 
California at San Diego and a pioneer in the field.  
"Perhaps the remarkable thing is that even though Mars is
not a favorable environment, the origin of life took place."
Astronomers have found that the same gases of our solar system
are present throughout the universe. Efforts to make microscopic
life from these basic elements on Earth suggest the chance of
life arising under similar circumstances is the same everywhere,
chemists, biologists and other experts say.
"It seems fairly likely that life similar to ours, if there  
is water available ... would evolve in other environments in 
our  galaxy or our universe," said James Ferris, a leading   
researcher and editor of the journal "Origins of Life and 
Evolution of the Biosphere."  
Underlying much of the research is the question: was the 
development of life on Earth unique, or did the universe's  
chemical elements naturally evolve into life?  
The answer appears to be that at least the chemical  
reactions that set the stage for early life would be similar 
everywhere, but resultant living organisms would differ 
because of the genetic mutations in evolution. 
"If you've got the same starting materials and the same  
conditions, you're going to get the same compounds, that's 
for sure," Miller said. "The real question is whether or not 
there are very chance elements in the formation of life."  
Miller first suggested that life was a natural evolution 
when, in a much-heralded 1953 experiment, he mixed basic 
gases approximating the Earth's early atmosphere with an 
electric  charge inside a glass chamber and produced amino 
acids, a primitive building block of life.  
It seemed like science was on the cusp of conjuring up  
creations in the laboratory, but the next 43 years were to  
present unexpected challenges. 
"Making the amino acids made it seem like the rest of the 
steps would be very easy; it's turned out that it's more 
difficult that I thought it would be," Miller said in an 
interview. "It's a series of little tricks. Once you learn 
the trick it's very easy; the problem is learning the trick." 
Rather than trying to cook up life in one pot from basic 
chemicals interacting, scientists have broken the task into  
little parts, much as explorers might split into teams to 
survey  certain paths without any one person navigating the 
entire  terrain.   
"No one has been able to, you know, sort of connect those 
line segments and just start with organic compounds and make 
something that's evolving," said Gerald Joyce, an expert on  
"in-vitro evolution" at the Scripps Research Institute.  
Joyce's research focuses on the end of the chain toward life  
in which chemicals transform into a biological substance that 
can replicate and mutate and thus evolve over time.  
He takes ribonucleic acid (RNA) which hold genetic code key  
to reproduction and "breeds" them with the help of other 
molecules. He is hoping that one day his breeding will spawn 
something living that replicates on its own.   
"It's just like breeding flowers or something," he said. "We 
pick the best and the brightest, you know, and use those a   
parenting stock to produce the next set of progeny." 
Ferris' experiments, conducted on the microscopic level in   
test tubes, show that the minerals in clay help chemical 
compounds form RNA. The study suggests that life started not 
in  the sea or even by arriving from outer space, as some 
have  suggested, but by splashing onto the surface of rocks.  
Even though Miller, Joyce, Ferris and others have made  
impressive progress in certain sections on the road to life, 
complete genesis, which took not a week but hundreds of 
millions of years on Earth, remains elusive.   
"God knows how long it will take us to do," said Jack 
Szostak, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School.  
"We've been working on it for 10 years; it might take another   
few years or it might take another 20 or 30 years."  
Yet the results so far are encouraging enough for some  
scientists to conclude the universe is a vast spawning ground 
of  life, with as many as trillions of planets capable of 
sustaining  life.  
"The Earth is not a freak speck around a freak star in a 
freak galaxy, lost in an immense 'unfeeling' whirlpool of 
stars  and galaxies," Nobel laureate Christian de Duve wrote 
in "Vital Dust," a book about the origin of life. "The 
universe was -- and presumably still is -- pregnant with life."
Copyright 1996 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.
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