Robert Shapiro

The main topic of a recent Science article is a claim that life on Earth was jumpstarted by a very early hit by a moon-size object that precipitated a metallic hailstorm. But while sketching that scenario, which wowed a 2018 conference in Atlanta in October, Robert F. Service also recounts some of the more interesting conflicts in origin of life studies: Arguments have sometimes been heated. At a 2008 meeting on the origin of life in Ventura, California, [biochemist Robert] Shapiro and John Sutherland, a chemist at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, wound up shouting at each other. “Bob was very critical about published routes to prebiotic molecules,” Sutherland says. If the chemistry wasn’t ironclad, “he felt Read More ›