From ScienceDaily:
Researchers have for the first time shown that ribose, a sugar that is one of the building blocks of genetic material in living organisms, may have formed in cometary ices.
Origin of life is a somewhat unusual field for a science in that “may have” is equivalent to a discovery.
Maybe that’s why James Tour has no time for it.
As a first step, an artificial comet was produced at the Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale. By placing a representative mixture of water (H2O), methanol (CH3OH) and ammonia (NH3) in a high vacuum chamber at — 200 ̊C, the astrophysicists simulated the formation of dust grains coated with ice, the raw material of comets. … Several sugars were detected, including ribose. Their diversity and relative abundances suggest that they were formed from formaldehyde (a molecule found in space and on comets that forms in large quantities from methanol and water).
Although the existence of ribose in real comets remains to be confirmed, this discovery completes the list of the molecular building blocks of life that can be formed in interstellar ice. Paper. (paywall) More.
It’s useful to know that a great deal of human intervention can produce this result. Whether it happened historically is another matter.
With origin of life, as with evolution of life, a difficulty resulting from the acquisition of significantly more information is that metaphysics is subjected to the tests of history. It is enough for metaphysics to show that things “could have” happened in a given way; history asks, but did they? That’s going to become a bigger issue now, and may be one reason that James Tour hasn’t been shut down.
See also: James Tour on the hypocrisy of origin of life conjectures – updated
and
Maybe if we throw enough models at the origin of life… some of them will stick?