Playing God

One of the building blocks of life has been reproduced in a lab

Bovine spleen. Herring sperm. Wheat germ.

These were places, in 1900, that contained the yeast from which uracil was first isolated and discovered.

A component of RNA, uracil is a main element of our genetic material.

And now, for the first time, this crucial building block of life (at least as we know it) has been reproduced in a laboratory, according to a recent ScienceDaily.com article.

How did they do it? Under "space-like conditions," scientists from NASA took a piece of ice that contained pyrimidine, a compound containing nitrogen and hydrogen found in meteorites, and exposed it to ultraviolet radiation -- et voila! -- uracil.

"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," said Michel Nuevo, research scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center in California.

"Nobody really understands how life got started on Earth, said Scott Sandford, a space science researcher at Ames.

"Our experiments demonstrate that once the Earth formed, many of the building blocks of life were likely present from the beginning. Since we are simulating universal astrophysical conditions, the same is likely wherever planets are formed."

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image: Stefanie Milam, Michel Nuevo and Scott Sandford (credit: Dominic Hart/NASA)