NASA Reproduces a Building Block of Life In the Lab

xp65 writes "NASA scientists studying the origin of life have reproduced uracil, a key component of our hereditary material, in the laboratory. They discovered that an ice sample containing pyrimidine exposed to ultraviolet radiation under space-like conditions produces this essential ingredient of life. 'We have demonstrated for the first time that we can make uracil, a component of RNA, non-biologically in a laboratory under conditions found in space,' said Michel Nuevo, research scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. 'We are showing that these laboratory processes, which simulate occurrences in outer space, can make a fundamental building block used by living organisms on Earth.'"

Comments

Re:An Application?

[fatalGlory]

There's a committed portion of the US population who don't need to "head..towards understanding the origins of life" because they are absolutely certain that they know exactly how life came about because a guy who though of the cell as a simple blob wrote a book that tells them what he thought happened after you have the first life. They're not going to take kindly to anything that could challenge their certainty.

There. Fixed that for you ;)
Mods can have my karma if they want it, its still a purely religious assertion to say that life spontaneously arises. It's unobserved and there's good reason to believe its impossible (e.g. the chirality problem). We have a word for that where I come from, we call it unscientific.