Remember Robert Frost’s poem “Fire and Ice”?* Here’s a slightly different version based on recent RNA research:
Some say the world began in fire;
Now some say ice.
From what I knew of volcanic mire
I sided with some who favored fire;
Hot water and mud seemed just the place
For ancestors of the human race.
But now I doubt what I once knew
And have begun to think anew.
For replication, ice
Is also great
And might suffice.
For a long time I believed that hydrothermal vents were ideal places for life’s emergence. Found on the ocean floor and therefore enveloped by water, the vents spew dissolved mineral matter into a medium already potentially rich in hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, and phosphorus compounds. With just the right chemistry, some energy source, such as the heat from the vents, and other environmental conditions like clays (muds) that could provide crystal growth patterns on which to piggyback, life could arise as RNA and eventually DNA learned to replicate. I thought heat was essential for the two processes of replication and encapsulation, the latter important because life exists in containers like cell membranes and the skin that keeps you inside.
Now, there’s been an experiment that reveals a potential relationship between life’s initial replicative process and colder environments.** The experiment by James Attwater and others aimed to answer how primordial life formed by replicating folded RNA. The scientists engineered a ribozyme that can achieve this task, and the environment for this replication was in a brine between ice crystals, that is, in an environment vastly different from hot hydrothermal vents.
We pride ourselves on our scientific understanding that seems to increase yearly. We’ve come a long way from Democritus and Aristotle, a long way from Francis Bacon, and a long way from the discovery of the microscopic world by Antony van Leeuwenhoek. But in spite of our advances, we’re still somewhat at a loss to explain those first processes by which life grabbed its place on Earth. So, maybe we should still temper our pride with a bit of humility. We know all we know, but some of what we know isn’t really quite fully knowable. For all our supposed sophistication, we’re still in the dark about those abiotic and biotic processes of long ago, processes without which we wouldn’t be able be here.
If we walk through a university library, we’ll see an accumulation of knowledge that indicates that we have come a long way from our earliest fumbling ignorance of materials and processes. We might express pride in that knowledge, but we are left with some very fundamental questions that still humble us. We don’t know how life started. We have guesses, some better than others; possibly some we will discover to be accurate. But it seems that every time we try to answer the most fundamental questions, we generate a new set of unknowns.
We might be proud of what we know, proud of all those books we’ve accumulated. Our ignorance, however, is a great motivator to discover those unknowns. We might believe that all will be ours someday and that we will acquire wisdom with knowledge. I have my doubts. I still can’t answer the question about whether or not life began in fire or ice.
*Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice. –Robert Frost
**Medical Research Council. "Scientists crack how primordial life on Earth might have replicated itself." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 15 May 2018. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/05/180515131551.htm>.
James Attwater, Aditya Raguram, Alexey S Morgunov, Edoardo Gianni, Philipp Holliger. Ribozyme-catalysed RNA synthesis using triplet building blocks. eLife, 2018; 7 DOI: 10.7554/eLife.35255
Some say the world began in fire;
Now some say ice.
From what I knew of volcanic mire
I sided with some who favored fire;
Hot water and mud seemed just the place
For ancestors of the human race.
But now I doubt what I once knew
And have begun to think anew.
For replication, ice
Is also great
And might suffice.
For a long time I believed that hydrothermal vents were ideal places for life’s emergence. Found on the ocean floor and therefore enveloped by water, the vents spew dissolved mineral matter into a medium already potentially rich in hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, and phosphorus compounds. With just the right chemistry, some energy source, such as the heat from the vents, and other environmental conditions like clays (muds) that could provide crystal growth patterns on which to piggyback, life could arise as RNA and eventually DNA learned to replicate. I thought heat was essential for the two processes of replication and encapsulation, the latter important because life exists in containers like cell membranes and the skin that keeps you inside.
Now, there’s been an experiment that reveals a potential relationship between life’s initial replicative process and colder environments.** The experiment by James Attwater and others aimed to answer how primordial life formed by replicating folded RNA. The scientists engineered a ribozyme that can achieve this task, and the environment for this replication was in a brine between ice crystals, that is, in an environment vastly different from hot hydrothermal vents.
We pride ourselves on our scientific understanding that seems to increase yearly. We’ve come a long way from Democritus and Aristotle, a long way from Francis Bacon, and a long way from the discovery of the microscopic world by Antony van Leeuwenhoek. But in spite of our advances, we’re still somewhat at a loss to explain those first processes by which life grabbed its place on Earth. So, maybe we should still temper our pride with a bit of humility. We know all we know, but some of what we know isn’t really quite fully knowable. For all our supposed sophistication, we’re still in the dark about those abiotic and biotic processes of long ago, processes without which we wouldn’t be able be here.
If we walk through a university library, we’ll see an accumulation of knowledge that indicates that we have come a long way from our earliest fumbling ignorance of materials and processes. We might express pride in that knowledge, but we are left with some very fundamental questions that still humble us. We don’t know how life started. We have guesses, some better than others; possibly some we will discover to be accurate. But it seems that every time we try to answer the most fundamental questions, we generate a new set of unknowns.
We might be proud of what we know, proud of all those books we’ve accumulated. Our ignorance, however, is a great motivator to discover those unknowns. We might believe that all will be ours someday and that we will acquire wisdom with knowledge. I have my doubts. I still can’t answer the question about whether or not life began in fire or ice.
*Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice. –Robert Frost
**Medical Research Council. "Scientists crack how primordial life on Earth might have replicated itself." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 15 May 2018. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/05/180515131551.htm>.
James Attwater, Aditya Raguram, Alexey S Morgunov, Edoardo Gianni, Philipp Holliger. Ribozyme-catalysed RNA synthesis using triplet building blocks. eLife, 2018; 7 DOI: 10.7554/eLife.35255
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