The Case for a Bubble at Life’s Start

“You need a container before you can get the chemistry” that enables cellular life, says astrobiologist Bruce Damer. He’s among those researchers who favour a ‘lipid-first’ hypothesis for the origin of complex life: that the lipid membrane that corrals the cell is key to its success. Or even that bubbles of lipids, plus the chemistry they enclosed, could have propagated and evolved in a Darwinian-like way, before RNA (or DNA) arrived on the scene.