A new molecule that performs the essential function of life - self-replication - could shed light on the origin of all living things.

If that wasn't enough, the laboratory-born ribonucleic acid (RNA) strand evolves in a test tube to double itself ever more swiftly.

"Obviously what we're trying to do is make a biology," says Gerald Joyce, a biochemist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. He hopes to imbue his team's molecule with all the fundamental properties of life: self-replication, evolution, and function.

Joyce and colleague Tracey Lincoln made their chemical out of RNA because most researchers think early life stored information in this sister molecule to DNA. And unlike the stuff of our genomes, RNA molecules can catalyse chemical reactions.

"We're trying to jump in at the last signpost we have back there in the early history of life," Joyce says.