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How Did Life Begin?

In this documentary Nobel Prize recipient Sir Harry Kroto attempts to answer one of world’s most puzzling question: how did life on earth come to be? Take a look at the recent scientific research in the field and learn about the ancient world of RNA and DNA.

There are of course no definative answers offered by this documentary, but we get the feeling that we are closer than ever to discovering the answer to the age old question of how life began.

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  1. Very interesting video, I liked it alot.

  2. This is a very top-level intro into the creation of life (abiogenesis). It misses a lot of detail and is likely intended for consumption by the masses. Nevertheless, it’s worth a watch.

  3. This was a nice video. It introduces the concept of the RNA world hypothesis, but doesn’t go into detail explaining it. It is, in fact, the most likely hypothesis we have for explaining an abiotic origin of life. RNA is not very complex, and has been shown to form under various conditions that would have been present in the early earth. Combine that with the amino acids required for building proteins, and the fact that lipids will spontaneously form a cell wall in aqueous solutions due to hydrophobic effects, and it is very easy to imagine how the first cells could have formed a million times over until just one of them had just the right amount of each material to reproduce itself.

    Obviously there are other variables. If you are interested in learning about the RNA world hypothesis, I recommend finding recently published books about it, as well as taking a couple of introductory biochem classes. I’m kind of amazed that the previous poster expected to understand all of the details just by watching a documentary on the internet. :p

  4. Just have a look here for instance.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jtmOZaIvS0&feature=related

    You can see a short animation how complex the stuff is. BTW, the animation of DNA replication is shown in real time as it happens in your body as you watch it.

    And this is an amazing movie. Watch this :

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3fOXt4MrOM&feature=related

    • Well you need to consider the fact that the cambrian only took place 550million years ago. And life has existed for 3.9 billion. it took almost 3 billion years for multicellularity to occur. That is almost an unfathomable time scale.

  5. Very disappointing movie. The DNA is just the code for how to build it. RNA is just the replication mechanism. There is a unmatched complexity around them, which enables them to exist.
    The step between the molecules themselves and even the most primitive cell is just enormous.