Origin of Life

Source-derived questions

Questions extracted from the papers in this topic, excluding the curated questions above.

• How did Cech's discovery of self-splicing RNA support the idea of an early 'RNA world'?
• How did Schrödinger's 1944 book What Is Life? influence Francis Crick's move into biology?
• How did the Miller-Urey result shift the study of the origin of life from philosophy to experimental chemistry?
• What gas mixture did Stanley Miller use to simulate early Earth's atmosphere, and why?
• What is the RNA World hypothesis, and what circular problem about proteins and RNA does it try to resolve?
• What organic molecules did Philae detect during its sixty hours of operation, and why did they matter to origin-of-life questions?
• Why did finding an RNA enzyme give the RNA world hypothesis its first real experimental support?
• Why does later uncertainty about early Earth's actual atmospheric composition complicate the experiment's conclusions?
• Why has building an RNA molecule that can copy a version of itself proven so experimentally difficult?

Sources

• Death of Erwin Schrödinger
• Lasker Award (Basic Medical Research)
• Miller–Urey experiment produces organic molecules from inorganic precursors
• Nobel Prize in Chemistry
• Philae lander touches down on Comet 67P
• Self-replicating polymerase ribozyme supports RNA World hypothesis

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