We could soon discover a new kind of life on Earth – and if not we’ll make it (Image: Grant Faint/Photographer's Choice/Getty)

Part 1: Making new life

Part 2: The search for shadow life

Gallery: What might shadow life be like?

WHEN the Nobel prizewinning physicist Richard Feynman died in 1988, his blackboard carried the inscription, “What I cannot create, I do not understand.” By that measure, biologists still have a lot to learn, because no one has yet succeeded in turning a chemical soup into a living, reproducing, evolving life form. We’re still stuck with Life 1.0, the stuff that first quickened at least 3.5 billion years ago. There’s been nothing new under the sun since then, as far as we know.

That looks likely to change. Around the world, several labs are drawing close to the threshold of a second genesis, an achievement that some would call one of the most profound scientific breakthroughs of all time. David Deamer, a biochemist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has been saying that scientists would create synthetic life in “five or 10 years” for three decades, but finally he might actually be right. “The momentum is building,” he says. “We’re knocking at the door.”

Meanwhile, a no-less profound search is on for a “shadow biosphere” – life forms that are unrelated to the life we know because they are descendants of an independent origin of life. We know for sure that life got going on Earth once, so why couldn’t it have happened twice? Many scientists argue that there is no reason why a second genesis might not have taken …