After 10 years of testing every possible combination of prebiotic chemicals, Dr. Sutherland discovered that the solution was not to build the ribose and the sugar units separately in textbook fashion, but to construct a substance that was part sugar and part base. The addition of another simple chemical converted this hybrid into a ribonucleotide. The door to the RNA world had at last been opened.

If this step was critical, Dr. Sutherland inferred, then the rest of prebiotic chemistry must somehow be related to it. He and colleagues have spent the last six years doing experiments to see how the ribonucleotide chemistry pathway can be linked back to hydrogen cyanide as its starting point, and how other significant prebiotic chemicals might have emerged from the cyanide-to-nucleotide pathway.

So far they have demonstrated ways to generate 12 of the 20 amino acids used in proteins, two of the four ribonucleotides of RNA, and glycerol 1-phosphate, the universal building block of the lipids from which cell membranes are formed. Their findings were reported in Nature Chemistry.

Though other researchers have shown how several of these substances could have formed on primitive Earth, these required a variety of conditions, some incompatible. This is the first time that so many significant life chemicals have been shown to emerge from the same chemistry.

Dr. Sutherland’s report “lays out for the first time a scenario for generating potentially all of the building blocks of life in one geological setting,” said Jack W. Szostak, a geneticist at Massachusetts General Hospital who studies the origin of life. “The details of the scenario will be debated for some time, but over all, I think it’s a very big advance,” he said. Dr. Szostak shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2009 for the discovery of the mechanism that protects the ends of chromosomes.

Dr. Sutherland’s chemicals cannot all be mixed together at once. His reaction scheme requires them to be delivered in sequence to a central pool. So in his scenario, separate streams flow over mineral deposits and arrive one by one at the pool. Therein lies a possible weakness, Paul J. Bracher, a chemist at Saint Louis University in Missouri, said in a commentary in Nature Chemistry. “This new report represents a fantastically interesting approach, but origin-of-life chemists still have plenty of work to do in the kitchen,” he wrote.