Re: Show me the polymers!

On 12/18/24 9:17 PM, MarkE wrote:

Would you like fame and fortune? This is not a scam. All you need to do is perform an updated variation on the Miller-Urey experiment:
 Simply set up simulated warm little ponds with an unlimited supply of activated concentrated canonical enantiomerically pure nucleotides, along with your choice of wet/dry cycles, temperature variability, mechanical agitation, mineral substrates, pH changes, UV, electricity, other chemicals, ions etc, physical pockets and sub-ponds, geothermal activity, etc etc, and observe the development of RNA strands. As many ponds as you like, for as long as you like. You can do it in the lab or in actual ponds in Iceland. Of course, no cheating by sprinkling with pre-existing rybozymes etc.
 Wait...why has no-one done this? What better way to progress OoL research? "Look, our little warm ponds have produced a population of RNAs from 3 to 13 units long...we are on the road to life!" The incentive is certainly there - peer accolades and grant funding would flow in.
 I can tell you why no-one is doing this and reporting the results. Because it will not and does produce growing RNA polymers. It will yield tar.
 No? Then show me the polymers!
 Indeed, Damer and Deamer have issued precisely this challenge, and it's been crickets:
 “[OoL research has] been mainly focused on individual solution chemistry experiments where they want to show polymerization over here, or they want to show metabolism over here, and Dave and I believe that it's time for the field to go from incremental progress to substantial progress. So, these are the four points we've come up with to make substantial progress in the origin of life, and the first one is to employ something called system chemistry, having sufficient complexity so instead of one experiment say about proteins, now you have an experiment about the encapsulation of proteins for example, and informational molecules built from nucleotides in an environment that would say be like an analog of the early Earth, build a complex experiment. Something we're calling sufficient complexity, and all of these experiments have to move the reactions away from equilibrium. And what do we mean by that? Well, in in your high school chemistry experiments, something starts foaming something changes color and then the experiment winds down and stops. Well, life didn't get started that way. Life got started by a continuous run-up of complexity and building upon in a sense nature as a ratchet. So we have to figure out how to build experiments that move will move away from equilibrium...”
 “You can't sit in a laboratory just using glassware. You have to go to the field. You have to go to hot springs, you have to go to [...] Iceland and come check and sit down and see what the natural environment is like, rather than being in the ethereal world of pure reactants and things like that...”
 Source: A new model for the origin of life: A new model for the origin of life: Coupled phases and combinatorial selection in fluctuating hydrothermal pools. https://youtu.be/nk_R55O24t4?feature=shared
 Also: https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/ast.2019.2045
 

I'm sure you could this if you could keep the microbes we've already from eating the experiment.  It's almost impossible as we've see from efforts to keep comet dust clean.  Even if you could keep it clean it would take a long time, probably millions of years to get a living cell, or even a reproducing RNA strand.  It'd be very interesting just to go as far as you could and see how long it takes.