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A New Model for the Origin of Proto-Informational Oligomeric Material on the Early Earth, and Elsewhere

Presenter: Simon Platts, Carnegie Institution for Science
When: July 12, 2004 1PM PDT

Many of the suggested definitions for the phenomenon of life stress the fundamental importance of oligomeric species demonstrating storable, replicable, and evolvable informational capacity. The chemical problem of the origin-of-life might therefore reduce to a prebiotically plausible mechanism for the formation of a first generation of proto-informational oligomeric material on the early Earth. This talk will present an outline of a new chemical model which is currently being developed, and which would seem to be on the way to providing an intuitively satisfying solution to the problem of the origin of the first proto-informational oligomers at the origin of life.

FAR Seminars