But, while the story is somewhat hyped and breathless, let’s at least say that a lab at Harvard is closing in on creating proto-life. That is, the life-like microscopic aggregations they are making certainly wouldn’t qualify as cellular life, but could be seen as precursors to that, whether that’s the way cells actually formed in “the real world” or not.
Protocellular work is even more radical than the other field trying to create artifical life: synthetic biology. Even J. Craig Venter's work to build an artificial bacterium with the smallest number of genes necessary to live takes current life forms as a template. Protocell researchers are trying to design a completely novel form of life that humans have never seen and that may never have existed.
Basically, this research is based on the idea that a virus-like bit of RNA at some point wandered into a “bubble” of fatty acid, and started replicating. The lead Harvard researcher, Jack Szostak, has already shown how such fatty acid bubbles could remain stable in a great variety of conditions. John Sutherland, a chemist at the University of Manchester, has demonstrated one plausible way that RNA could have spontaneously been created in such a prebiotic world. And Szostak has shown how nucleic acids could have then reproduced inside such an environment.
This is a must read if you’re a science junkie, so click that link.
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