Imagine that we could create a primitive living cell in a laboratory, starting with only relatively simple chemical ingredients. That would be an enormous feat. It is likely to take many decades before this will be possible, but most people working in Origins of Life studies expect that such a breakthrough will happen, sooner or later. I can only hope to be still alive then myself, to be able to witness what will be one of the greatest scientific discoveries ever.

Most likely it will not be a single clinching experiment, like the discovery of the Higgs particle, where you either have or have not discovered such a new particle. There will be a period during which some systems will be assembled that have strongly life-like properties but that may not yet be robust enough to survive unaided. But once we get close enough, I expect that creating artificial forms of life will be only a matter of time, and it will then be a high research priority.

Of course, many questions will arise, from ethical and legal questions of how to regulate such experiments to practical questions of how to prevent new life forms to interact with existing life forms in ways that are harmful. The closer we will get to creating life in a lab, the more attention these questions will receive. In addition, I envision two curiosity-driven purely scientific questions that will present themselves.

The first question is obvious: what does such an accomplishment mean for the question of how life originated on Earth? It may well be that life formed on Earth in the distant past in a very different way than what we can do in the laboratory now. Or perhaps the possibilities of how life can form are rather limited in principle, to the point that what can be done in the lab has to follow to a large extent what happened four billion years ago on Earth. We have no clue at this point, and the most important aspect of creating life in a lab, from scratch, is that it will begin to answer this question.

A second question that will be triggered is less obvious. Once we have learned how to make a living system, any living system, in the lab, will we then be getting close to answering the question "What is life?"? In my next blog piece I will approach this second question.