First life : discovering the connections between stars, cells, and how life began / David Deamer.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 259-265) and index.

A fireball over Australia -- Where did life begin? -- When did life begin? -- Carbon and the building blocks of life -- The handedness of life -- Energy and life's origins -- Self-assembly and emergence -- How to build a cell -- Achieving complexity -- Multiple strands of life -- Catalysts : life in the fast lane -- Copying life's blueprints -- How evolution begins -- A grand simulation of prebiotic earth -- Prospects for synthetic life.

Print version record.

This pathbreaking book explores how life can begin, taking us from cosmic clouds of stardust, to volcanoes on Earth, to the modern chemistry laboratory. Seeking to understand life's connection to the stars, David Deamer introduces astrobiology, a new scientific discipline that studies the origin and evolution of life on Earth and relates it to the birth and death of stars, planet formation, interfaces between minerals, water, and atmosphere, and the physics and chemistry of carbon compounds. Deamer argues that life began as systems of molecules that assembled into membrane-bound packages.

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