Steven Novella in Neurologica:
It is common to observe that one of the greatest unsolved questions of science is how life began. This is a distinct question from how the diversity of the species of living things emerged. It is well established that once life had established a self-replicating system capable of generating some variation, that evolutionary forces would kick in and could, and in fact did, create all life on Earth. But we are a long way from reverse-engineering in any detail how those first organic molecules transitioned from chemistry to life.
This is not a scientific question that will be meaningfully resolved with a single experiment or discovery. Answers will slowly yield over time, as they already are, and it will take decades and perhaps centuries for something approaching a complete picture to emerge. But this progress will be built one study at a time, and Japanese scientists have recently contributing a significant piece to the puzzle.
More here.