A recent special issue of Philosophical Transactions B takes on one of the biggest mysteries in science: how life first began. Instead of trying to replay Earth’s exact history, the issue’s authors look for the universal rules that might make life possible anywhere in the cosmos — the right mix of energy, chemistry, and information.
“This is part of a broader effort to uncover general laws of biological organization,” says SFI External Professor Ricard Solé, director of the Complex Systems Lab at Universitat Pompeu Fabra. “We wanted to bring together researchers from physics, chemistry, biology, and even astrobiology to ask what life can be — not just what it was on Earth.”
The collection of papers explores that question from many angles. Some focus on the first protocells, the tiny, bubble-like structures that may have served as life’s earliest containers. Others look at phase transitions — the same kind of sudden shifts that turn water to ice — to explain how simple molecules could have crossed thresholds into organized, living systems.
“What’s exciting about this issue is that it takes ideas that were once abstract and turns them into things we can actually test,” says SFI Professor Chris Kempes. His own paper tackles encapsulation, or what it takes to package a self-sustaining metabolism inside a primitive cell. “You can’t always bottle a metabolism,” he says. “We outline the physical limits — how big the molecules can be, how fast reactions must run, how quickly material leaks away — that determine whether a cell can even exist.”
Other contributors draw on thermodynamics and evolutionary dynamics to calculate how early chemical systems might have organized themselves, and on synthetic biology experiments that recreate pieces of that process in the lab. Even AI is starting to play a role, not by replacing scientists, Solé and Kempes note, but by helping explore the enormous space of chemical possibilities.
The ultimate goal, they say, is to connect theory and experiment tightly enough to move the field forward. “As in cosmology,” says Solé, “progress will come from the back-and-forth between models and measurements — until we can explain not just how life began here, but how it could begin anywhere.”
Read the special issue “Origins of life: the possible and the actual” in Philosophical Transactions B (October 2, 2025). https://royalsocietypublishing.org/toc/rstb/2025/380/1936