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Life Before the Cell

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Abstract

Ever since the classic experiment by Stanley Miller (1953) it is known that many organic molecules can be formed spontaneously in a variety of environmental conditions. Organic molecules have been found, for example, in meteorites that arrived on Earth, and spectroscopy has revealed their presence in comets and in interstellar space. This tells us that organic matter is formed spontaneously whenever and wherever suitable conditions exist, and today we know that those conditions existed on Earth at a very early stage of its history.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Morfologia ed Embriologia, University of Ferrara, Ferrara, Italy

    Marcello Barbieri

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  1. Marcello Barbieri
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Barbieri, M. (2015). Life Before the Cell. In: Code Biology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14535-8_4

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