Creating Life In The Lab – Or At least Trying To Do So

Louis Pasteur experimentally proved that life could not come from non-life. Scientists are still trying to prove that he was wrong. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.




Joel Kontinen

The origin of life is a hard nut to crack for scientists who only accept naturalistic scenarios. One cannot blame them for the lack of effort, however.

A recent article in Science states:

“In 2009, Jack Szostak shared a Nobel Prize for his part in discovering the role of telomeres, the end bits of chromosomes that help ensure genetic information is copied faithfully. But his biggest achievement may be yet to come. Szostak, a molecular biologist at Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, is working to recreate the origin of life, only this time in the lab. He and his team haven't accomplished their goal yet. But in this issue of Science, they report taking another key step: finding a recipe for copying RNA inside ‘protocells,’ membranes made from fatty acid molecules. Next they hope to show that RNA can replicate itself and show the initial signs of Darwinian evolution.”

After roughly a hundred years of trying to figure out a plausible method of how they could get life from non-life against all odds, scientists are reluctant to admit that it cannot be done.

Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) experimentally disproved the idea that life could come from inanimate matter.

As DNA is far too complex, Darwinians have set their hopes on RNA. However, living beings are full of sophisticated nano machines that cannot be produced by gradual Darwinian processes. All parts have to be present and interact with the others from the very beginning.

Source:

Service, Robert F. 2013. The Life Force. Science 342 (6162), 1032-1034. (29 November).