Making Sense of the Chemistry That Led to Life on Earth

An article in the New York Times highlights the work of John Sutherland, a group leader at the LMB, who has determined a possible chemical pathway to produce the starting materials of life. In his laboratory he tested all the chemical reactions needed to make precursors of lipids, nucleotides and amino acids, the building blocks of life, and developed evidence that these could occur under the conditions expected of primitive Earth. More…