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First I apologize for my incorrect English and for lack of modern knowledge regarding the subject (I studied biology a long time ago).

I'm interested to find out:

  • if there were successful attempts of life creation from conditions that we suppose were dominant on early Earth

  • if there were not, are such attempts still being conducted?

To clarify, by "life creation" I mean the accidental creation of entire organism in conditions of organic compounds, water, electricity, radiation etc. being present (Abiogenesis).

If this is already answered here, I'm sorry for asking, I have researched this, this, this and this question with no luck.

alec_djinn
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Miloš Đakonović
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There have been lot's of attempts, no success so far, a few groups are still working on. However, many steps forward have been done in the last decades.

Starting from the Miller experiment which demonstrated that the building blocks of life chemistry can be obtained starting from fairly simple chemical compounds. Following, Luisi and Szostak showed that 1) nucleic acids can polymerize without the help of enzymes and 2) autocatalytic micelles form spontaneously in many different conditions. It is also important to remember the work of Otto that showed how different molecules can self-replicates.

There are many more examples reported in the literature, still, the complete "creation" of life from matter has not been yet accomplished. However, the results from the experimental work done so far suggest that it is only matter of time and lots of combinatorial work. Unfortunately, there are little to no investments in this field. It's very hard to get the funds needed to start an international cooperation (like the one made to sequence the human genome or to build the CERN's Large Hadron Collider) with the goal of actually making life in the lab. I think that the work of a few (uncoordinated) groups will not get to the goal in the next few years.

alec_djinn
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  • I would add that even these more basic results have really shown that abiogenesis is feasible. It is definitely feasible to show in a lab that certain steps are possible given certain conditions (like polymerization of nucleic acids). What isn't feasible is doing the experiment on whole-earth scale and waiting for potentially millions of years. It's really frustrating that some people take the infeasibility of that last step and conclude "oh so life must have come from a Creator!" That isn't what it means at all. – Bryan Krause Jun 02 '17 at 16:24
  • I agree. But I also think that it is possible to do it in the lab without having to wait millions of years. Actually, I hope that the pressure set from creationists will move some billionner to put money into this research. Is one of the great question of biology, is still lacking the final prove and it worth a Nobel price once solved. We can definitely do it, it's really just matter of money/organization. – alec_djinn Jun 02 '17 at 18:32
  • Maybe, but if that attempt fails it doesn't prove anything, so really the experiment is quite flawed - probably one of the reasons there isn't much support for it. – Bryan Krause Jun 02 '17 at 18:36
  • I see lot's of support already from all the experiments reported in the literature. Surely it's not easy to solve, but again founding the Higgs boson wasn't easy as well, and same you can say or the first Human Genome. Now it's routine. Soon or later it will be routine also to create life in a lab. – alec_djinn Jun 02 '17 at 19:50
  • I think that's a cool thought, but I'm skeptical. I think it is more likely that we will find life on another planet than create it here truly from scratch. I think we will continue to fill in some of the puzzle pieces here, though. The problem is that for those other projects you can engineer solutions that still answer the original question, like producing particles that are otherwise near infinitely rare to occur naturally. For abiogenesis, if the whole point is to say 'early earth could create life from scratch' you are sort of cheating if you add anything to the system. – Bryan Krause Jun 02 '17 at 21:20
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    @BryanKrause you say: 'early earth could create life from scratch'. My view of abiogenesis is more general: any complex mixture of chemicals, with enough energy and time, will tend to form complexity. Chemical complexity leads eventually to Life (the is, chemistry at the nth power). In this sense, there is nothing to "add to the system". It's just matter of finding the way of repeating the process in a controllable and repeatable way. I would expect different biochemistry evolve every run even if the initial conditions are the same. Eventually, some of them will evolve Life. – alec_djinn Jun 02 '17 at 21:29
  • But you are assuming that that can happen on an experimental scale in a lifetime. The actual hypothesis is that it occurred at least once on a global/geological spatial/temporal scale. If you want to just say "tend to form complexity" we have already seen that to some extent. – Bryan Krause Jun 02 '17 at 22:12
  • Yes, I think it can happen on an experimental scale in a lifetime. Under controlled conditions, reaching a self-reproducing protocell should be doable. Then having that protocell evolving into some bacteria-like life form may take ages. But yes, I am speculating on that. – alec_djinn Jun 03 '17 at 06:46
  • I find your speculations correct. However, there is a problem coming out precisely from running the experiment with a different outcome each time. See, scientists expect falsifiability of their experiments, it's heavily expected that if you run an experiment over and over again you should get the same result every time you run it. But it's not what you expect, or more likely shouldn't be what you expect when you run experiments for the creation of life-here one must expect that different outcome every time it's run and that destroys falsifiability. – Yordan Yordanov Jul 17 '22 at 04:00
  • That field of highly complex chemistry may indeed be the only case in science where you would expect to have unexpected result and that hampers your data analysis. If you produce different biochemistry each time you run the thing what about your statistics or any other interpretation of your data? Can you imagine doing the math of a different outcome of a highly complex experiment already? Do you think anyone could get enough funds to support such an endeavor? I highly doubt it, not with what we currently have as hardware and funds, at least. – Yordan Yordanov Jul 17 '22 at 04:06