How Far Are We from Creating Life in the Lab?

James Tour is one of the leading chemists and nanoscientists in the world, and in a recent podcast he explains to journalist Eric Metaxas why scientists are further than ever from being able to create life in a laboratory or being able to solve the mystery of how life began in the first place.

Evolution News offers a summary of the podcast:

Tour explains that origin-of-life scientists aren’t even close to intelligently synthesizing life from non-life in the lab. The problem, Tour says, is that some leading origin-of-life [OOL] researchers give the impression they are right on the cusp of solving the problem.

Not so, Tour says. He offers the analogy of someone claiming, in the year 1500, that he has the know-how to build a ship to travel to the moon, when no one yet knows even how to build an airplane, car, or car engine.

Tour says that if he took a cell that had just died a moment before and asked top origin-of-life researchers to engineer it back to life, they couldn’t do it. They’re not even close to being able to do it.

And yet all the ingredients, all the building blocks of life are right there, all in one place, in the right proportions. And not only can scientists not engineer those ingredients back to life, they still can’t synthesize even a fraction of the building blocks essential to cellular life, despite decades and millions of dollars poured into the problem.

And yet they assume that purely blind material processes turned prebiotic chemicals into all the key building blocks, and then mindlessly engineered those into the first self-reproducing cell on the early Earth.

There are no models that would make such a scenario plausible. And the more we learn about cellular complexity, the harder the problem gets.

Indeed, as Tour puts it, origin-of-life research is like moving down a football field in nanometer increments while the goalposts are racing away.

For OOL researchers to say we're close to creating life in the lab, Tour says, is like a man in the 1500s saying that he's close to being able to fly to the moon.

A big part of the problem is that scientists working in the field assume that however life came about it must've been through natural, physical processes. Intelligent agency is ruled out a priori and not even considered. Maybe this refusal to entertain the possibility that a mind was involved in creating life makes their project impossible from the start.

The podcast also touches upon the reaction Tour has gotten from the OOL community. They're understandably not happy about being told that their life's work is futile.