We don’t know exactly how life began on earth, but there are a few interesting hypotheses. The RNA world hypothesis, where self-copying molecules of RNA evolved first, is the consensus theory amongst most scientists, but another interesting idea is the panspermia hypothesis. While this theory doesn’t make any guesses about how life started in general, it posits that life was seeded on earth as a fully formed DNA organism from space.
Like experiments to support other theories about the origin of life, a synthetic approach works well here. Can we re-create the moment when living cells landed on earth from space? Can life survive an interplanetary trip at all? The Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment (or LIFE) seeks to find out just that, shooting freeze dried microorganisms to one of Mars’s moons.
My favorite part? “It’s a see-what-happens experiment, which you don’t get a lot of anymore.” In a lot of ways, this sums up my experience with synthetic biology. Does this protein function in yeast? Can we make this pathway work in bacteria? What if we switch in a gene from a different organism? What happens when you mix these two species together in a test-tube? For all the talk about computational design and off-the-shelf engineering, most biotechnology is still a trial-and-error affair, some people just get to use rockets to do it.
