Can We Ever Understand the Formation of Life?

In our first interview with Mayer, he discussed using pressure cycling to study prebiotic chemistry. In the second part of our conversation with Mayer, he reflects on whether it will be possible for us to fully understand the formation of life and what his research is helping him to understand about early molecular evolution (1).

LCGC International: Based on your findings, what do you see as the most significant implications of your work for understanding the possible pathways leading to the formation of functional protocells?

Mayer: As I said, we will not be able to really prove how life has formed on this planet. This is something that I believe is impossible. Since all these traces, all these residues of the early formation of life, will be gone, there is no way to really show what really happened. On the other hand, I believe it's very important to find basic processes that lead to complicated and functional structures. If we can identify them, then we can think further. Then we can, for example, think about how life on other planetary bodies, on moons, for example, might start. We right now have a project together with NASA, where we study processes on Titan Titans, the moon of one of the moons of Saturn, the biggest moon, and it's a moon which has a very dense atmosphere, and we believe that this atmosphere, and condensation of this partial condensation of this atmosphere, can also lead to the formation of vesicles. So maybe this is a target we follow. Maybe we can prove the formation of vesicles on Titan, for example. And maybe we can show that such processes, which lead to complicated and functional structures, may have started in very early steps on Titan, for example, but may also start in the same way on other planetary bodies, on other moons. It may be a very important trace that we may find there that such a process is nothing very unique to Earth, but may also occur in other environments. And if we can show that, then we would have at least discovered a principle that potentially leads toward life without knowing how life started on Earth, but we would know how principally, life could begin in other environments.

This interview segment is Mayer is part of our conversation with him. You can view all our coverage of Analytica USA here.

Reference

1. Analytica USA, Speakers: Christian Mayer. Analytica USA. Available at: https://aus2025.mapyourshow.com/8_0/sessions/session-details.cfm?scheduleid=68 (accessed 2025-09-24).