Scientists Recreate 1960s 'Particles of Life' 60 Years Later

After nearly 1,000 failed attempts, PhD candidate Nayan Chakraborty peered through his microscope in early 2023 and saw something that made him immediately text his adviser. Tiny blue spheres floated in his lab dish, matching images from a forgotten experiment conducted half a century ago.

The spheres, called "jeewanu" or "particles of life," were first created by Krishna Bahadur and S. Ranganayaki, a husband-wife chemistry team at the University of Allahabad in the 1960s. Bahadur had claimed these structures could grow, multiply, and show signs of metabolism after exposing simple chemicals to sunlight, suggesting they might be living units.

The scientific community largely dismissed their work, and the couple faded into obscurity. Their groundbreaking research survived mainly in memories of former students and family members, gathering dust in academic archives.

Shashi Thutupalli, an associate professor at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bengaluru, stumbled upon their work in 2019 while reading a Hungarian chemist's paper. Puzzled why such bold claims weren't better known, he decided to investigate whether jeewanu could actually be recreated.

Three months of experiments turned into three years of careful research. Thutupalli and Chakraborty developed a simpler recipe than Bahadur's original, using just four basic compounds: formaldehyde, diammonium molybdate, ferrous sulfate, and diammonium hydrogen phosphate.

Their results, now published as a preprint awaiting peer review, show these protocells can self-organize into compartments that grow and display basic metabolism. While the team stops short of calling them "living" as Bahadur did, the implications run deep.

Why This Inspires

The work tackles one of science's biggest mysteries: how did life first emerge from non-living chemicals on early Earth? The new research offers a plausible pathway from simple compounds to cell-like structures, showing how complexity can arise from basic ingredients and sunlight.

Even more exciting, the protocells produce lipid-like and amino acid-like compounds during formation, giving them both structural and chemical similarities to actual cells. This triple connection makes the findings particularly remarkable for origin-of-life research.

The discovery also resurrects the legacy of an unconventional couple whose pioneering approach was ahead of its time. Bahadur published in Nature in 1954 on synthesizing amino acids with sunlight, earning an invitation to the first international symposium on life's origins in 1957 alongside only one other Indian scientist.

The research could reshape how we search for life beyond Earth, suggesting we might need to look for different markers than we currently use. Sometimes the most important scientific insights come from dusting off old ideas and giving them another chance with modern tools.