The origins of life is a challenging but important scientific, philosophical, historical and cultural problem. Part of this difficulty lies in the paucity of direct evidence of life's emergence. REPO is committed to advancing the fields of prebiotic chemistry and radical chemistry by articulating and investigating hypotheses that are specific, testable and experimentally tractable.

For this reason, we regularly update hypotheses that connect radical chemistry to the origins of life and openly publish them here. We do this to encourage collaborative experiment design and cross-disciplinary communication. We also do this to emphasize how prebiotic chemical systems powered by radicals may be fundamentally different compared to chemical systems commonly invoked for prebiotic scenarios, such as those driven by redox gradients, pH differences, mineral catalysis or thermal potentials. Our objective is not to exclude or minimize these phenomena, or the decades of knowledge behind them, but to critically assess whether radicals more readily afford unique, systemic behaviors.

Click below to see some of the open questions that REPO members are currently investigating.