First I apologize for my incorrect English and for lack of modern knowledge regarding the subject (I studied biology a long time ago).
I'm interested to find out:
if there were successful attempts of life creation from conditions that we suppose were dominant on early Earth
if there were not, are such attempts still being conducted?
To clarify, by "life creation" I mean the accidental creation of entire organism in conditions of organic compounds, water, electricity, radiation etc. being present (Abiogenesis).
If this is already answered here, I'm sorry for asking, I have researched this, this, this and this question with no luck.
Answer
There have been lot's of attempts, no success so far, a few groups are still working on. However, many steps forward have been done in the last decades.
Starting from the Miller experiment which demonstrated that the building blocks of life chemistry can be obtained starting from fairly simple chemical compounds. Following, Luisi and Szostak showed that 1) nucleic acids can polymerize without the help of enzymes and 2) autocatalytic micelles form spontaneously in many different conditions. It is also important to remember the work of Otto that showed how different molecules can self-replicates.
There are many more examples reported in the literature, still, the complete "creation" of life from matter has not been yet accomplished. However, the results from the experimental work done so far suggest that it is only matter of time and lots of combinatorial work. Unfortunately, there are little to no investments in this field. It's very hard to get the funds needed to start an international cooperation (like the one made to sequence the human genome or to build the CERN's Large Hadron Collider) with the goal of actually making life in the lab. I think that the work of a few (uncoordinated) groups will not get to the goal in the next few years.
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