Origin of Life Research Award (Sponsor Harry Lonsdale)

The sponsor an award for the best original proposal pertaining to the study of the origin of life on Earth, including an outline of work to be performed in support of the proposal."Life" is defined here as a self-sustained chemical system capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution. Funding: $50K for best proposal; $2,000,000 in Potential Research Funding.
Specific questions to be addressed include:
• What were the nature and genesis of the first macromolecules on the prebiotic earth? How did the building blocks that comprise these macromolecules become available and how were they assembled?
• How did prebiotic molecules first acquire the capacity for storing genetic information and how did the genetic machinery evolve?
• At what stage in the origin of life did cells originate, and what did they contain? How did those primitive cells evolve to modern biological cells?
• What was the chemistry of the first metabolic pathway(s) and how did that metabolism evolve to modern cellular metabolism?
• At what stage did proteins become involved in metabolic processes and how did the link first arise between genetic molecules and other functional molecules, such as enzymes?