Project on the origins of life launched

Project on the origins of life launched: "Harvard University is launching a broad initiative to discover how life began, joining an ambitious scientific assault on age-old questions that are central to the debate over the theory of evolution. The Harvard project, which is likely to start with about $1 million annually from the university, will bring together scientists from fields as disparate as astronomy and biology, to understand how life emerged from the chemical soup of early Earth, and how this might have happened on distant planets. Known as the ''Origins of Life in the Universe Initiative,' the project is still in its early stages, and fund-raising has not begun, the scientists said. But the university has promised the researchers several years of seed money, and has asked the team to make much grander plans, including new faculty and a collection of multimillion-dollar facilities. The initiative begins amid increasing controversy over the teaching of evolution, prompted by proponents of ''intelligent design,' who argue that even the most modest cell is too complex, too finely tuned, to have come about without unseen intelligence. President Bush recently said intelligent design should be discussed in schools, along with evolution. Like intelligent design, the Harvard project begins with awe at the nature of life, and with an admission that, almost 150 years after Charles Darwin outlined his theory of evolution in the Origin of Species, scientists cannot explain how the process began. Now, encouraged by a confluence of scientific advances -- such as the discovery of water on Mars and an increased understanding of the chemistry of early Earth -- the Harvard scientists hope to help change that. ''We start with a mutual acknowledgment of the profound complexity of living systems,' said David R. Liu, a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard. But ''my expectation is that we will be able to reduce this to a very simple series of logical events that could have taken place with no divine intervention.'"