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Extracts (10)

Take some carbon dioxide, ammonia, formaldehyde, hydrocyanic acid, and salt. Put them in water and heat. Reduce to hot goo at the bottom of the pan; add more salt water. Repeat until you have a thick broth containing amino acids, sugars, and fatty acids. Throw in seasoning to taste. Each reduction and rehydration will thicken the broth further, until it includes many newly created nitroglycopeptides, and they will begin to form the protopolymers you need.

Some of the fatty acids will have hydrophobic tails and will tend therefore to stick together aligned with each other. These masses are your protomembranes, which in the heat of your stove top will wrap into tubes, also spheres with holes in them. Inside these little tart shells, a stuffing of protopolymers will clump together in a variety of macromolecules. These begin the chemical breaking and joining we call catalysis.

Chemical patterns in your new stuffing will yield similar combinations most of the time, and these new combinations will match up chemically in ways that can be read off each other; so information is now burbling around in your stuffing, and into and out of the hole in the cell wall will come useful molecules for more reactions. Linking up with patterned molecules already inside, these characteristic actions are coded by the basic chemistry, so they will keep occurring. What began as small accidental connections will link together in patterned ways, until the same polymers are always replicated, creating information contained in the longest chains to have been cooked up. At that point you have ribonucleic acid, RNA, and you are close to being ready.

The new RNA encodes the making of proteins, which in their three-dimensional sculptural glory are capable of creating a huge variety of tastes and smells. “Division of labor” in the proteins and what they accomplish is one way to describe the proliferation of replicating forms, but also, it’s a richer brew; it tastes better; there are micro-tastes within the taste. Your RNA will turn amino acids into particular flavors. (The technical term among biologists is “translation.”)

Finally some of your RNA will melt together into strands of DNA, a more stable form because of its double helix. Then DNA will take over the role of protein expression, although by way of the creation of messenger RNA. (That would be “transcription.”) Information at that point will move from DNA to RNA to proteins, and the now living cell will reproduce itself, divide up functions in ever-more-versatile larger organisms, and so on.

You have cooked up life from scratch! Eat it with gusto.