Rather than springing forth from a conglomeration of carbon-based, or organic, chemical compounds, life may have been born of inorganic compounds more akin to table salt and washing soda, according to a team of chemists that recently created cell-like structures from a mixture of inorganic chemicals.
Chemist Jerzy Maselko of the University of Alaska in Anchorage and his colleague Peter Strizhak of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in Kiev devised the concoction.