Specifically, a borax-containing mineral known as colemanite
helps convert organic molecules found in interstellar dust
clouds into a sugar, known as ribose, central to the genetic
material called RNA. This announcement provides a key step
toward solving the 3-billion-year-old mystery of how life on
Earth began. The findings will appear in Friday's issue of the
journal Science. Steven Benner, Alonso Ricardo, Matthew Carrigan
and Alison Olcott built on a famous experiment done 50 years
earlier by Stanley Miller that is found in many textbooks. In
1953, Miller showed that electric sparks in a primitive
atmosphere made amino acids, the building blocks of proteins.
Miller's experiment failed to identify sugars that were needed
for genetic material, however. "The sugar ribose can be formed
from interstellar precursors under prebiotic conditions," said
Benner, who led the research funded by NASA, the National
Science Foundation and The Agouron Institute in Pasadena, Calif.
"But ribose is too unstable to survive und