The spontaneous coalescence of the molecules that led to life on primordial Earth, some 4 billion years ago, may have finally been observed in a laboratory. Replicating the likely conditions of our newborn planet, chemists have joined together RNA and amino acids " the crucial first step that would eventually lead to the proliferation of living organisms that crawl all over Earth today. The experimental work could yield important clues about the origins of one of the most important biological relationships: the one between nucleic acids and proteins.