THE centuries-old idea that life was seeded from space was dusted off last week, thanks to a controversial study of a meteorite that struck Earth 40 years ago.
A team led by Zita Martins at Imperial College London claims it has found some of the fundamental chemical building blocks of our genetic code in the Murchison meteorite, which landed in Australia in 1969. In the mass of organic chemicals they isolated they found two ring-shaped carbon-containing molecules: uracil, a base that is essential for the creation of RNA, and xanthine, a close chemical relative of the DNA base, guanine.
Such…
