Not as we know it

....the next phase of the chemistry-biology interface is going to be creating new biologies. And ultimately, because all biology is a subset of chemisty and all biologies are a subset of chemistry, we might find a new biology that is much more impressive than our own existing one. There might be twenty or thirty synthetic biologies in...two hundred years which we've actually produced for our benefit.

-- John Sutherland

An interesting question is whether life could only emerge in the kinds of environment that existed on the early Earth. Maybe genetic materials don't really have to look like RNA or DNA.

-- Jack Szostak

Both quoted in Acts of Creation, Frontiers, BBC Radio 4

Maybe the early Earth looked a bit like Iceland. -- Philipp Holliger

P.S. 9 August: Recreate life to understand how life began, says Jack Szostak.