For 70 years the mainstream science literature has presented enormously misleading coverage about origin-of-life research. There has been a huge amount of bunk and baloney in the press coverage of origin-of-life research, and the statements made on this topic by scientists themselves have very often been wildly inaccurate. Many examples of such misstatements can be found here and here and here and here and here and here and here.
Never has more boasting and hype been written when the results were so minimal and meager. It is not merely that no experiments have ever produced life from non-life. The reality is that no experiments realistically simulating the early Earth have ever produced any of the main building components of single-celled life, and that no experiments realistically simulating the early Earth have ever produced any of the building components of the building components of single-celled life.
The research output: "peanuts" (i.e. "chickenfeed")
The main building components of one-celled life are functional protein molecules, which have never been produced in any experiment realistically simulating the early Earth. The building components of such building components are amino acids, which have never been produced in any experiment realistically simulating the early Earth. The widely-discussed Miller-Urey experiment (which did produce some amino acids) was not anything like a realistic simulation of early Earth conditions, requiring a very specially constructed glass gizmo unlike anything that would have existed on the early Earth, and requiring a degree of electricity exposure unlike any part of the early Earth would have experienced.
Let us look at a recent example of groundlessly boasting origin-of-life research. Some scientists created a very fancy chamber device which they claim simulates interstellar space. Inside the device they put some glycine, which is the simplest amino acid. They zapped the chamber with some energy that they claim was simulating cosmic rays, and got the most meager result: a mere peptide molecule. The peptide molecule they got was what you can get from combining two glycine molecules. The result was as simple as 1 +1 = 2 or "a + a = aa."
The result is passed off as a simulation of what could happen in interstellar space. But is that claim accurate? No, it is not, because there is no robust evidence that glycine exists in interstellar space. Recent claims to have found glycine after a soil sample retrieval from an asteroid in the solar system do not count as such robust evidence, both because such an asteroid is not in interstellar space, and because the amounts supposedly detected are so minute they can credibly be accounted for by assuming terrestrial contamination (as I discuss here).
In the 2006 paper here we read about an apparent false alarm regarding the detection of the amino acid glycine in interstellar space:
"The early searches for glycine were all negative, but two years ago Kuan et al. (2003) reported detection of a number of glycine lines, some 27 in several astronomical sources. Unfortunately, this claim has not been confirmed. The amount of glycine claimed by Kuan et al. is in conflict with previously published upper limits (e.g. Combes et al. 1996; Ceccarelli et al. 2000), and glycine lines which should have appeared were not found. In a detailed analysis of the evidence, Snyder et al. (2005) recently concluded that few, if any, of the lines attributed by Kuan et al. to interstellar glycine were actually from that molecule. The spectroscopic data on which the claim of Kuan et al. was based have not been published or made available to other workers, and there is now a fairly wide consensus among radio astronomers and laboratory spectroscopists that glycine has not yet been found in space."
A more recent 2022 paper tells us this: "The simplest amino acid, glycine (NH2CH2COOH), has been searched for a long time in the interstellar medium, but all surveys of glycine have failed."
So, you are not realistically simulating interstellar space by putting glycine in a chamber and zapping it with energy. The glycine-zapping experiment does nothing to make it seem more likely that extraterrestrial life exists, or that life could form naturally. But our clickbait-loving "science news" press fell for the story "hook, line and sinker."
And so we have an article at the clickbait-heavy phys.org, an article with the extremely misleading headline shown below. At least the article has a visual which shows that all that is going on is "one plus one equals two" stuff. I added the bottom row as commentary to what is shown above.
We have a quote from the main researcher, Sergio Ioppolo making this untrue claim: "We already know from earlier experiments that simple amino acids, like glycine, form in interstellar space." Experiments could never show that glycine forms in interstellar space. Only observations could show that, and no robust observations show that.
Ioppolo makes this false claim: "But research like ours shows that many of the complex molecules necessary for life are created naturally in space." No, it does not show any such thing. All it shows is that when you stick in a chamber two simple glycine molecules and zap them with energy, you might get a molecule looking like two glycine molecules joined together, which is a result as unimpressive as the deduction that one plus one equals two.
