Life's Rocky Start; April 2001; Scientific American Magazine; by Robert M. Hazen; 10 Page(s)

No one knows how life arose on the desolate young earth, but one thing is certain: life's origin was a chemical event. Once the earth formed 4.5 billion years ago, asteroid impacts periodically shattered and sterilized the planet's surface for another half a billion years. And yet, within a few hundred million years of that hellish age, microscopic life appeared in abundance. Sometime in the interim, the first living entity must have been crafted from air, water and rock.

Of those three raw materials, the atmosphere and oceans have long enjoyed the starring roles in origins-of-life scenarios. But rocks, and the minerals of which they are made, have been called on only as bit players or simply as props. Scientists are now realizing that such limited casting is a mistake. Indeed, a recent flurry of fascinating experiments is revealing that minerals play a crucial part in the basic chemical reactions from which life must have arisen.