Did life begin in a pool of acidic gloop? – life – 19 January 2009 – New Scientist.
First thing that strikes me is: well that’s obvious! Getting out of the lab and into the wild is guaranteed to break the conceptual mold. Deamer is a clever man and his work is very interesting.
Second, what if ribo-organisms could use sulfuric acid? Could they colonise the clouds of Venus? Weird particles float around in Venus’ clouds and no one has identified them for sure yet – perhaps they’re sulfuric acid life?
Third, making RNA is a significant step, but there’s still a big informational gap between some oligonucleotides and a living cell. The problem isn’t as bad as once imagined – ribo-organisms could have genomes about 7,000 bases long. But “random” sequence shuffling won’t make a functional genome in less than many quadrillions of Hubble times. Some higher level principle had to have organised the RNA to boot-strap life. Deamer and Szostak are still a ways from finding out just what it was.