Many leading origin-of-life biochemists hailed this bold hypothesis as the most plausible chemical evolutionary approach to explaining the origin of life. Yet by the late 1970s, Kenyon himself began to question the plausibility of his own theory. Experiments increasingly contradicted the idea that functional proteins could have assembled themselves from their amino-acid building blocks without preexisting genetic information in DNA directing the process. This forced Kenyon to reconsider the importance of DNA for building proteins and to search for an explanation for the origin of the
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