[I know this is LONG, but I think it’s worth it.]
From DISCOVER Magazine February 2008, By Douglas Fox

One morning in late 1997, Stanley Miller [Ed. note Yes, THAT Stanley Miller, of the Miller/Urey Experiment] lifted a glass vial from a cold, bubbling vat. For 25 years he had tended the vial as though it were an exotic orchid, checking it daily, adding a few pellets of dry ice as needed to keep it at -108 degrees Fahrenheit. He had told hardly a soul about it. Now he set the frozen time capsule out to thaw, ending the experiment that had lasted more than one-third of his 68 years.

Miller had filled the vial in 1972 with a mixture of ammonia and cyanide, chemicals that scientists believe existed on early Earth and may have contributed to the rise of life. He had then cooled the mix to the temperature of Jupiter’s icy moon Europa–too cold, most scientists had assumed, for much of anything to happen. Miller disagreed. Examining the vial in his laboratory at the University of California at San Diego, he was about to see who was right.

As Miller and his former student Jeffrey Bada brushed the frost from the vial that morning, they could see that something had happened. The mixture of ammonia and cyanide, normally colorless, had deepened to amber, highlighting a web of cracks in the ice. Miller nodded calmly, but Bada exclaimed in shock. It was a color that both men knew well-the color of complex polymers made up of organic molecules. Tests later confirmed Miller’s and Bada’s hunch. Over a quarter-century, the frozen ammonia-cyanide blend had coalesced into the molecules of life: nucleobases, the building blocks of RNA and DNA, and amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. The vial’s contents would support a new account of how life began on Earth and would arouse both surprise and skepticism around the world.
(snip)
There were people who found the results a little too remarkable. When Bada and Miller submitted their findings to a top-tier science journal, the article was rejected. A reviewer of the manuscript felt that those molecules must surely have formed while the samples were thawing, not while frozen at the ridiculously low temperature of -108 degrees F. So Miller, Bada, and Levy did more experiments to show that thawing played no role. They published their results in another journal, Icarus, in 2000.

The skepticism they faced was understandable. Chemical reactions do slow down as the temperature drops, and according to standard calculations, the reactions that assemble cyanide molecules into amino acids and nucleobases should run a hundred thousand times more slowly at -112 degrees F than at room temperature. By that reckoning, even if Miller had run his experiment for 250 years - let alone 25 - he should have seen nothing.

This is the main argument against Miller’s experiment, and against a cold origin of life in general. But strange things happen when you freeze chemicals in ice. Some reactions slow down, but others actually speed up-especially reactions that involve joining small molecules into larger ones. This seeming paradox is caused by a process called eutectic freezing. As an ice crystal forms, it stays pure: Only molecules of water join the growing crystal, while impurities like salt or cyanide are excluded. These impurities become crowded in microscopic pockets of liquid within the ice, and this crowding causes the molecules to collide more often. Chemically speaking, it transforms a tepid seventh-grade school dance into a raging molecular mosh pit.

“Usually as you cool things, the reaction rates go down,” concluded Leslie Orgel, who studied the origins of life at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, from the 1960s until his death last October. “But with eutectic freezing, the concentrations go up so fast that they more than make up” for the difference.

Cyanide is a good candidate as a precursor molecule in the life-in-a-freezer model for several reasons. First, planetary scientists suspect that cyanide was abundant on early Earth, deposited here by comets or created in the atmosphere by ultraviolet light or by lightning (once the atmosphere became oxygen rich, 2.5 billion years ago, the process would have stopped). Second, although cyanide is lethal to modern animals, it has a convenient tendency to self-assemble into larger molecules. Third, and perhaps most important, no matter how much cyanide rained down, it could become concentrated only in a cold environment-not in warm coastal lagoons-because it evaporates more quickly than water.

“The strong point of freezing,” according to Orgel, “is that you concentrate things very efficiently without evaporation. “Freezing also helps preserve fragile molecules like nucleobases, extending their lifetime from days to centuries and giving them time to accumulate and perhaps organize into something more interesting -like life.
(snip)

While Miller and Orgel followed their clues in the lab, other scientists pursued their obsession with life’s chilly origins to the ends of the earth.

In July 2002 a small skiff dropped Hauke Trinks on the beach of Nordaustland, a rocky island encased in glaciers and nearly devoid of plants. Trinks, then a physicist at the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg in Germany, had come to Nordaustland - far north of the Arctic Circle - to peer 4 billion years back in time to an era shortly after the end of the bombardment of Earth by asteroids. According to some solar evolution models, the sun was some 30 percent dimmer at that time, providing less heat to Earth. So as soon as the hail of asteroids stopped, Earth may have cooled to an average surface temperature of -40 degrees F and a crust of ice as much as 1,000 feet thick may have covered the oceans. Many scientists have puzzled over how life could have arisen on a planet that was essentially a giant snowball. The answer, Trinks suspected, involved sea ice. (snip)

He built a makeshift lab table from planks of wood and discarded gasoline cans. He examined slices of sea ice under the microscope, his hood pulled tight around his eyes. Turning a knob with a gloved hand, he nudged a metal electrode nearly as fine as a red blood cell closer to an ice crystal. The needle on his voltmeter jerked sideways, registering a sharp drop in voltage on the crystal’s surface - evidence of a microscopic electric field that might arrange and orient molecules on the ice’s surface. (snip)

By the time Trinks returned to Hamburg in 2003, he had formulated a theory that ice was doing much more than just concentrating chemicals. The ice surface is a checkerboard of positive and negative charges; he imagined those charges grabbing individual nucleobases and stacking them like Pringles in a can, helping them coalesce into a chain of RNA. “The surface layer between ice and liquid is very complicated,” he says. “There is strong bonding between the surface of the ice and the liquid. Those bondings are important for producing long organic chains like RNA.”(snip)

Biebricher [a chemist Trinks convinced to work on his sea ice theory] sealed small amounts of RNA nucleobases - adenine, cytosine, guanine - with artificial seawater into thumb-size plastic tubes and froze them. After a year, he thawed the tubes and analyzed them for chains of RNA.

For decades researchers had tried to coax RNA chains to form under all sorts of conditions without using enzymes; the longest chain formed, which Orgel accomplished in 1982, consisted of about 40 nucleobases. So when Biebricher analyzed his own samples, he was amazed to see RNA molecules up to 400 bases long. In newer, unpublished experiments he says he has observed RNA molecules 700 bases long. Biebricher’s results are so fantastic that some colleagues have wondered whether accidental contamination played a role…(snip)

Biebricher had loaded the deck somewhat, because he wasn’t growing RNA chains from nothing. Before he froze his samples, he added an RNA template - a single-strand chain of RNA that guides the formation of a new strand of RNA. (snip)

Ice may prove the crucial ingredient here, too. Deamer and his former student Pierre-Alain Monnard (now at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico) have run experiments frozen at 0 degrees F for a month, without the aid of templates. In those relatively brief experiments they already see RNA molecules up to 30 bases long, at least as long as other researchers have seen in similar experiments without ice.

How do you get from tiny snippets of RNA to longer, well-crafted chains that could have acted as the first enzymes, doing fancy things like copying themselves?(snip)

A young scientist named Alexander Vlassov stumbled upon a possible answer. He was working at SomaGenics, a biotech company in Santa Cruz, California, to develop RNA enzymes that latch on to the hepatitis C virus. His RNA enzymes were behaving strangely: They normally consisted of a single segment of RNA, but every time he cooled them below freezing to purify them, the chain of RNA spontaneously joined its ends into a circle, like a snake biting its tail. As Vlassov worked to fix the technical glitch, he noticed that another RNA enzyme, called hairpin, also acted strangely. At room temperature, hairpin acts like scissors, snipping other RNA molecules into pieces. But when Vlassov froze it, it ran in reverse: It glued other RNA chains together end to end.

Vlassov and his coworkers, Sergei Kazakov and Brian Johnston, realized that the ice was driving both enzymes to work in reverse. Normally when an enzyme cuts an RNA chain in two, a water molecule is consumed in the process, and when two RNA chains are joined, a water molecule is expelled. By removing most of the liquid water, the ice creates conditions that allow the RNA enzyme to work in just one direction, joining RNA chains.
(snip)
These findings inspired a theory that the first, extremely inefficient RNA enzymes got help from ice, which created an environment that encouraged short segments of RNA to stick together and behave as a single, larger RNA molecule. “Freezing stabilizes the complexes formed from multiple pieces of RNA,” concludes Kazakov. “So small pieces of RNA could be enzymes, not just large 50-base molecules.”
(snip)

All these processes would occur in microscopic pockets of liquid within the ice. “You have billions and billions of different possibilities,” Trinks says, “because you have billions of these small channels,” each like a microscopic test tube containing a unique RNA experiment. On the young Earth, pockets of liquid could have expanded into a network of channels that mixed their contents during freeze-thaw cycles, like day-night temperature changes in summer. In winter, the liquid pores would have contracted and become isolated again, returning to their separate experiments. With all the mixing, something special might eventually have formed: an RNA molecule that made rough copies of itself. And as Earth warmed, these molecules might have found a home in newly thawed seas or ponds, where something even more complex might have emerged - such as a cell-like membrane. “You have something that is multiplying itself, and you have variation that is inherited,” says Antonio Lazcano, a biology researcher and professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, in Mexico City. “There you have the onset of Darwinian evolution. I’m willing to call that living.”

To read the entire 4 page article, see here.