ABSTRACT
Background e problem of the origin of life is central to biology. It has been repeatedly addressed by scholars, including the above-quoted Erasmus Darwin and his famous grandson Charles, who wrote in his letter to J.D. Hooker of February 1, 1871: “It is often said that all the conditions for the rst production of a living organism are now present, which could ever have been present. But if (and oh! what a big if!) we could conceive in some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, &c., present, that a proteine [sic] compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes, at the present day such matter would be instantly devoured or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed” [2]. Fifty years
later, Oparin has suggested, in the rst comprehensive scenario of the abiogenic origin of life (abiogenesis), that the primordial reducing atmosphere could have favoured the spontaneous formation of proteinaceous bodies that could aggregate into coacervates (protocells) [3,4]. Independently, Haldane, building upon the achievements of virology, proposed that the life started from bacteriophage-like molecules synthesized under the inuence of the Sun’s radiation in the primordial “hot dilute soup” [5]. It has been repeatedly demonstrated [6-17] that simple building blocks such as amino acids or nucleobases could form from simpler compounds, provided that energy was delivered as UV light or electric discharges (see [18-36] for surveys of research on the origin of life, and a section below devoted to the more detailed consideration of particular concepts).
