Sort of. Over the last three years I’ve been fortunate to participate in a working group on the origin of life, coordinated by John Baross. John is the only faculty member in the group, the rest are graduate students from various departments (Earth and Space Sciences, Atmospheric Sciences, Microbiology, and Oceanography) participating in the Astrobiology Program. Three members of the original group are now postdoctoral researchers at other institutions (Princeton, Stanford, and the Carnegie Institute). The working group began as a seminar series. Each week (over pizza and beer – critical ingredients for the origin of life) a different student, or pair of students, would discuss some aspect of the origin of life as it related to their area of expertise. After a couple of years, and with a lot of encouragement from John, we decided to formalize our thoughts on the subject in a review article, now in publication in Geobiology.
The writing effort was led by Eva Stueken, a doctoral student in Earth and Space Sciences who made the biggest conceptual leaps for the group (check out Eva’s other recent paper in Nature Geosciences on the sulfur cycle of the early Earth). In the review article we try to develop the concept of early Earth as a “global reactor”. Often research groups within the origin of life community develop expertise on a specific geological environment and the synthesis therein of some key chemical precursors to life. This kind of specialization is necessary; without in-depth knowledge it is impossible to advance understanding. The pitfall is that it’s too easy to focus on your area of expertise and try to make the whole origin of life happen there whether it be a warm little pond, a hydrothermal vent, or a glacier.
The problem to this approach is that the early Earth wasn’t composed of a single geological environment, and there is no reason to think that all of the chemistry and selection necessary to produce life had to happen in once place. Chemically and physically the early Earth was an incredibly diverse and dynamic place, with a range of conditions partitioned in microenvironments. Hydrothermal vents, marine sediment, seawater, beaches, ice, dust grains in the atmosphere, volcanic pumice, and a thousand other sites each hosted many microenvironments just as they do today. Instead of one site (e.g. a black smoker in a hydrothermal vent field) hosting all the different reactions required to produce life it seems more likely that different processes would occur in different places, wherever the conditions were most optimal for each process and the stability of the products These products would have had many opportunities to mix, mingle, be selected, and react further in the oceans, land, and atmosphere of the Early Earth.
From Stueken et al 2013. It is reasonable to consider that the origin of life would have been the result of the synthesis, transport, and selection of chemical precursors across a range of environments. A select few environments are shown here, with associated mechanisms for transporting reaction products.
I started this entry with a note that this is not really a new model for the origin of life. There is not yet any complete model to replace, and what we develop in the review is more of a scaffold than an model. We stop short of noting the specific reactions that would need to occur in the global reactor and the environments in which they would be partitioned, necessary elements for a working model of the origin of life. Hopefully other researchers with specific expertise in these reactions will be able to use the scaffold to place these reactions in context, as the model itself undergoes further refinement and modification.
I like your attitude to this problem. Most people seem to be caught by one of the most popular ideas instead of thinking of other possibilities. These ideas are based on either a warm pond or deep sea smokers. But as you say, “early Earth wasn’t composed of a single geological environment”, and origin could combine many of them. Especially, I am convinced that cyclic reactions were involved in the early life creating processes. These could be created by waves on the sea shore, but I think the changes in temperature, light and moisture that is created by the day cycle are more probable causes. I have presented a theory in the Sandwalk blog: http://sandwalk.blogspot.no/2009/05/metabolism-first-and-origin-of-life.html.