Virtual Exhibition "The Origin of Life"

Dear visitors of the virtual exhibition "The Origin of Life",

we are glad to welcome you on our website.

It is human nature to want to know more about our biological past – right down to the origin of the first living cells. Therefore, from an early age, people studied the origin of life in order to learn and understand how life began and where living things in the world we know came from. Join us on a journey through the time of scientific research on the origin of life. We start in the middle of the 19th century and end with current research at our lab at the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU). Get to know different experiments and theories in this exhibition and learn more about the research at HHU, which focuses on hydrothermal vents as the place where life originated. We take you into the labs of the Institute of Molecular Evolution and dive with you into the mid-Atlantic Ocean to a depth of approximately 800 meters. There we come across the up to 60-meter-high hydrothermal vents.

Watch how we simulate the conditions found at the deep-ocean hydrothermal vents to answer the intriguing question: Did life originate from chemical reactions at hydrothermal vents? Discover that the first biochemical reactions that gave rise to life are similar to chemical reactions in the rocks of the Earth‘s crust at hydrothermal vents, and all life may have evolved from these rocks. Learn more about the deep-sea hydrothermal vents and the first living cells on Earth. But is there life beyond the Earth? Finally, let yourself be carried out into the depth of our solar system, to places where conditions exist that could also enable life.

We hope you enjoy your tour of the virtual exhibition

Prof. William F. Martin and his team (Institute of Molecular Evolution, HHU)