"Chemists find a recipe that may have jump-started life " Topic

…on Earth.

"In the molecular dance that gave birth to life on Earth, RNA appears to be a central player. But the origins of the molecule, which can store genetic information as DNA does and speed chemical reactions as proteins do, remain a mystery. Now, a team of researchers has shown for the first time that a set of simple starting materials, which were likely present on early Earth, can produce all four of RNA's chemical building blocks.

Those building blocks—cytosine, uracil, adenine, and guanine—have previously been re-created in the lab from other starting materials. In 2009, chemists led by John Sutherland at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom devised a set of five compounds likely present on early Earth that could give rise to cytosine and uracil, collectively known as pyrimidines. Then, 2 years ago, researchers led by Thomas Carell, a chemist at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, Germany, reported that his team had an equally easy way to form adenine and guanine, the building blocks known as purines. But the two sets of chemical reactions were different. No one knew how the conditions for making both pairs of building blocks could have occurred in the same place at the same time…."
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Amicalement
Armand

On top of all that, it's been known that nucleobases and nucleobases analogues have been found in various meteorites. It took a long time to rule out contamination from terrestrial sources.

From 7 years ago:

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Thanks my friend!.

Amicalement
Armand

So Miller and Urey do their famous experiment in 1953. In it, they collect what at the time scientists thought the early conditions of Earth were, and placed the constituents in a sealed bottle and heated and electrocuted the mixture. It yielded about 11 of the 20 amino acids found in all living things.

The only problem was that the concept of what the original conditions of the Earth was wrong.This underwent a rapid growth in understanding just shortly after the Miller Urey work. By adding more chemicals that more accurately represented primeval Earth, even more biochemicals were synthesized.

In 1961 Joan Oro synthesized adenine, a nucleotide found in RNA and DNA.

Oró J, Kamat SS (April 1961). "Amino-acid synthesis from hydrogen cyanide under possible primitive earth conditions". Nature. 190 (4774): 442–3.

And way, way earlier than that, Aleksandr Butlerov in 1861 started making sugars from formaldehyde. One of the sugars created was ribose which provides the longitudinal backbone of the RNA molecule.

A. Boutlerow (1861) "Formation synthétique d'une substance sucrée" (Synthetic formation of a sugary substance), Comptes rendus … 53: 145-147. Reprinted in German as: Butlerow, A. (1861), "Bildung einer zuckerartigen Substanz durch Synthese" (Formation of a sugar-like substance by synthesis), Justus Liebigs Annalen der Chemie, 120: 295-298.

This is all part and parcel of the "RNA World" theory. This was gaining traction in the time I was an undergrad (late 70's) and is now a pretty robust theory.

Here is a nice New York Times article illustrating the chemistry involved:

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It is the same John Sutherland from the original link.

Also to note, there are a few organisms, namely viruses, that only use RNA as their chemical means of inheritance. They do not have DNA. RNA viruses include HIV, Ebola, Influenza and the common cold. These may be some of the oldest organisms on the planet.