NASA Announces $8 Million Grant to Answer One of Life’s Biggest Questions

By Thomas Phippen

NASA and the National Science Foundation (NSF) are looking for someone to research and answer one of the most basic questions in the world: How did life begin?

In a request for proposals released Tuesday, NASA and NSF announced an $8 million research grant for organizations willing to tackle the “Origin of Life.”

The grant winner will be asked to conduct “potentially transformative research to address grand challenge questions in the origin of life,” the request said. “creative thinking and new research on the earliest events leading to life on early Earth.”

In addition to answering questions about life on this planet, the sponsors hope the research “inform our search for life on other worlds.”

The grant will ask researchers to focus on “a theoretical framework” that encompasses two theories about the origin of life — the “RNA first” and “metabolism first” theories. The RNA first theory focuses on how ribonucleic acid (RNA) could replicate itself in primordial conditions, while metabolism first theorists “focus on understanding chemical cycles that may have materialized in a prebiotic environment and could have led to the synthesis of nucleotides and other organic molecules,” according to The Scientist.

The grant will be awarded to five to 10 organizations, and proposals are due Dec. 19, 2016. The grant is part of the Ideas Labs program, which is “intensive workshops focused on finding innovative solutions to grand challenge problems.”

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