Early Earth's chemical seas are presumed to have given rise to the first life, but how could anything so complex have come from such a disorganized stew of molecules? That's the question Gerald Joyce of the Scripps Research Institute is exploring with his swarms of self-replicating RNA, which can evolve over time. Along with Steve Benner, Craig Venter, Jack Szostak, and others, he is on the road to creating life in the lab, thus giving us insight into both our origins and what, exactly, "life" is. As Dennis Overbye writes in a look at the field in the New York Times:
The possibilities of a second example of life are as deep as the imagination. It could be based on DNA that uses a different genetic code, with perhaps more or fewer than four letters; it could be based on some complex molecule other than DNA, or more than the ...
