The Primal Origins of Life

"This is a very big moment. There's nothing else like this machine in the world."
"We are very interested in understanding how the first very basic cell formed on the early Earth four billion years ago."
"Nobody knows, but I think that's what we have; a very solid proposal that this is potentially the mechanism."
"The molecules started to form cell-like structures and they started to incorporate genetic material just by themselves. It's amazing."
Maikel Rheinstadter, biophysics professor, lead investigator, Origins of Life Laboratory, McMaster University, Hamilton

Professors Maikel Reinstadter, right, and Ralph Pudritz pose for a photo with the planet simulator in the origins of life lab at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont., Wednesday, Oct. 3, 2018.
Peter Power/The Canadian Press

In 2012, Professor Rheinstadter, with Ralph Pudritz, a theoretical astrophysicist and Yingfu Li, a biochemist, made an application to the Canadian Foundation for Innovation for research funding with a proposal submitted describing their research looking for the origins of life. That proposal appeared for consideration just as NASA started revealing discovery of exoplanets where it was assumed that conditions might exist to support life, resulting in public interest surging, leading to the team's request for funding being approved. How serendipitous is that?

They then went about trying to find some company that could construct a simulator that would help to advance their work. Most companies they approached stated flat out that what they were looking for -- a planet simulator -- simply could not be built, only perhaps visualized. And then a company located in Kitchener, Ontario, decided to take on the project and the machine, after years of waiting was finally operational, allowing the researchers to mimic early Earth's 'seasons'.

They started off with a summer season within a volcanic environment, very hot during the day and cooling down at night, with occasional days of rain and periodic flooding. Within the simulator's chamber elements of the "primordial soup" were present, consistent with the chemicals and minerals that were in place during the early days of Earth's birth. That soup was comprised of inorganic salts, clays, lipid molecules and nucleotides at various concentrations.

While the lab's work is yet in its infant stages the planet simulator's results have excited great suspense. With the caveat that anything that has been done must be replicated to have any kind of scientific value. The simulator is roughly the size of a microwave, with the capacity to control temperature, humidity, pressure, atmosphere and radiation levels such as Earthly conditions at any historical point would have reflected. Moreover it has the capability of creating conditions reflective of any other planet.

Its purpose now is to test a theory suggesting life on Earth began in warm little ponds in response to meteorites splashing into them some four billion years ago. In recreating those conditions to determine whether cellular life can be created and evolve, that theory first thought by Charles Darwin, then expanded by Carl Sagan in the 1990s would have the effect of negating another theory suggesting the building blocks of life resulted through vents in the Earth's crust at the bottom of the ocean.

The researchers say their simulator has created proto-cells, not alive since the genetic material in the cells will still have to replicate itself and create proteins, but significant results withal. The lab experiments have resulted from Dr. Pudritz and graduate student Ben K.D. Pearce's calculations last year that meteorites bombarded Earth, delivering the building blocks of life which bonded to become ribonucleic acid; the basis for the genetic code.

"It's exciting times", Dr. Pudritz stated of the research the team at McMaster is currently testing. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany, Harvard University and the University of California, Santa Cruz are now expressing interest in joining the lab's experiments in determining the origins of life on Earth. The California professor who re-pioneered work on the warm ponds theory, David Dreamer, is impressed: "It's marvellous. They'll be able to do experiments no one else can."