INTRODUCTION: IN PURSUIT OF MY PASSION The mystery of life’s origin intrigues many people, including me. Graduate courses helped me develop a strong appreciation for life’s chemistry when I was in the doctoral program at Ohio University during the mid-1980s. Like a hungry man with a stack of pancakes set in front of him, I devoured books and journal articles that weren’t even required reading. I wanted to know how life originated. How could the chemical systems that carry out life’s fundamental processes