We still can't explain how ordinary chemistry turned itself into life

The problem

Every living thing runs on a tightly coordinated network of proteins, nucleic acids, and metabolism, but no one knows how that network bootstrapped itself from simple prebiotic chemistry. A central puzzle is the chicken-and-egg problem: today's DNA needs proteins to copy it, yet those proteins are built from DNA instructions. The leading 'RNA world' idea proposes that RNA — which can both store information and act as a catalyst — came first, but a fully demonstrated chemical path from geochemistry to a self-sustaining living system does not exist. With no clean origin date, the modern framing traces to the Oparin–Haldane hypothesis of the 1920s and has been sharpened ever since.

Why it matters

Answering it would tell us whether life is a near-inevitable consequence of chemistry or a fantastically improbable accident, which directly shapes how likely we are to find life elsewhere. It also underpins synthetic biology and our ability to define what 'alive' even means.

Progress so far

• 1924Oparin (and Haldane in 1929) propose that life self-organized from a 'primordial soup' of organic molecules
• 1953the Miller–Urey experiment shows amino acids form from simple gases and an electric spark
• 1986Walter Gilbert coins the term 'RNA world' for a stage where RNA both stored information and catalyzed reactions
• 2025review literature reframes the open question as the still-unexplained transition from chemistry to information-bearing biology

References

1. Wikipedia — overview of hypotheses, the Oparin–Haldane and RNA-world milestones, and open questions
2. Wikipedia — the leading framework and Gilbert's 1986 coinage of the term
3. Life (MDPI), 2025 review via PubMed Central — 2025 review treating prebiotic-chemistry-to-biology as an unresolved continuum