“To simulate a comet hitting pay dirt, Blank and her colleagues fire a bullet into a metal container the size of a can of beans. In this scenario, the container is the comet and the bullet is the hard ground. Inside the container is a small chamber about as big as a quarter, in which the scientists place a liquid sample of organic molecules.”
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SPACE.com — Did Comet Crashes Help Spark Earth Life?
I prefer a very broad definition of synthetic biology: trying to (re)create something about (life) science in order to understand it better. Shooting a bullet into a metal can may seem pretty far off from what it was like for a comet to strike the early earth, but who knows how far our models of what genetic pathways are like is from how cells work!
