This interview from NOVA explores the "recipe of life", a combination of specific elements that interacted to form life on Earth. It features Andrew Knoll, a Harvard professor of biology, who answers questions about early life forms and how life evolved from fundamental chemical building blocks involving a handful of elements.

Editor's Note This article provides insight into the chemistry of life and explores life from a framework of "planetary processes". The presentation is engaging and clear enough for secondary students to understand.

See Related Materials for a link to an interactive version of the famous 1953 Miller-Urey experiment, in which biochemistry students combined methane, water vapor, hydrogen, and ammonia....then introduced an electric charge. The result: amino acids (the building blocks of protein) were created.