Joyce's work could have been replicated by a single contaminating
bacterium. If it takes his supermolecule 5 minutes to cleave DNA, and they
are in fact random cleavages, how is that going to contribute anything to
the origin of life. I would look maybe for a molecule that had the ability
to put DNA together, not cut it apart, and put it together in such a way
that the sequence had meaning in terms of protein. Then you have a
significant molecule. Lots and lots of non biological chemical reagents
have the ability to cleave DNA a lot faster than Joyce's molecule, and a
lot more specifically as well. In fact the whole Maxim-Gilbert method of
sequencing DNA by chopping it at specific base pairs is based on this
effect. Joyce is still in the dark ages. But lest you be tempted to
suggest that the chemical process is more evidence of ease of developing
molecules with specificity, I would (needlessly) remind you that they are
just helping things go downhill faster. What we need is a way to get
things to go the other way by a mechanism that will at the same time impart
specific information content to the molecules. Now that we don't have. Yet.
Art
http://chadwicka.swau.edu