Despite decades of progress, the origin of life remains one of the great unsolved problems in science. But a new paper co-authored by associate professor of biology Aaron Goldman and NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory astrobiology research scientist Laurie Barge aims to answer this big question. According to the science, research, and technology news website Phys.org, “The authors argue that combining bottom-up laboratory research on plausible pathways toward an origin of life with top-down evolutionary reconstructions of early life forms can be used to discover how life truly did originate on the early Earth.” Goldman says his paper, which was published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, offers exciting possibilities. “Understanding how [the] most basic biological systems first took shape will not only give us greater insight into how life works at the most fundamental level, but what life actually is in the first place and how we might look for it bey...