Where does life come from?

Zita Martins tries to answer two questions: "How did life start on Earth?" and "Are we alone in the universe?".

Dr Zita Martins says that we know there were simple molecules on the early Earth that evolved to more complex structures. Then there was a jump where nobody knows what happened, and we had life. Dr Martins is an astrobiologist at Imperial College where she has been looking for particular molecules in 4.6 billion year old meteorites, of a similar age to the solar system. She recently discovered extra-terrestrial organic molecules that might indicate that life is far more widespread in the universe than hitherto thought. In a sample from the Murchison meteorite, that landed in the Sixties in Australia, she discovered that organic compounds, which are components of the genetic code in modern biochemistry, were already present in the early solar system and may have played a key role in life's origin.
Dr Martins has presented a number of radio and television programmes about the origins of life on earth and the likelihood of its presence elsewhere in the Universe.

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