[Sola Veritas]

“Using extremely sensitive mass spectrometers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, Cleaves, Bada, and colleagues found traces of 22 amino acids in the experimental residues. That is about double the number originally reported by Miller and Urey and includes all of the 20 amino acids found in living things, the scientists report tomorrow in Science.”

I doubt the veracity of this claim. However, it will be very easy to reproduce the original experiment and verify if this can be repleted. No replication...no veracity. Besides, they still have the problem that these experiments produced racemic mixes of the amino acid (optical isomers). Only one isomer of all the 20 is found in life on this planet. That doesn’t fit well with the results. Another reason it was scraped.

Plus, as noted, proteins are not self replicating (don’t bring up prions because that is a different situation). DNA contains the code (Codons) for the sequence of amino acids that make up a protein. That code is transcribed into a messenger RNA which is then translated into protein (a sequence of amino acids) at a ribosome (an RNA and Protein body) in all cells types....both simple (prokaryotic) and more complex (eukaryotic). From a molecular biology point of view, the “secret” of life is DNA is transcribed to RNA which is then translated into protein. That is the Central Dogma since Watson and Crick. It is still pretty much accepted.

[Soliton]

Cech and Altman independently discovered ribozymes, that is, very specific catalysts made of RNA. They showed that RNA catalysts, without the help of protein, can bring about difficult transformations of RNA substrates including hydrolysis and transesterification reactions.

Subsequent work by Szostak has shown that ribozymes can catalyze template-directed ligation reactions that might, in principle, permit RNA replication. Recently, Noller has provided evidence suggesting that ribosomal RNA, without the help of proteins, can catalyze the peptide bond-forming step of protein synthesis. These experiments support the hypothesis that a biochemistry based on RNA alone preceded the familiar biochemistry based on nucleic acids and proteins.

Francis H. C. Crick

http://www.fasebj.org/cgi/reprint/7/1/238.pdf

[Sir Francis Dashwood]

Did Volcanoes Spark Life on Earth?

ANSWER: NO.

Life came from somewhere else, just as the earth came from somewhere else.