Our Mission

Today our ability to search for the chemical origin of life is very different from the time when many “classic” origins of life experiments were carried out. For example, the identification of amino acids, adenine and adenosine in model prebiotic reactions were all accomplished with paper chromatography and known standards. Now, GC, MS, HPLC, and NMR can provide far more detailed analyses of the complex chemical mixtures that result from model prebiotic reactions, including the identification of unexpected products for which standards may not be available. These analytical capabilities, and our greater appreciation for the importance of self-assembly in the origin of life, present a powerful combination for making significant advances at this point in time. Finding molecules with the ability to self-assemble into RNA-like polymers, irrespective of whether these can be proven to be the ancestors of RNA, would undoubtedly create great excitement among scientists and the general public, and likely prove useful to synthetic chemists. Surely, the self-assembly of RNA-like and protein-like polymers would represent a major advancement in the area of molecular self-assembly, another exciting area of current research.