The idea that life on earth began in the furnace-like temperatures of a volcanic environment has received support from an experiment designed to reconstruct the chemical events that may have led to the first living cells. The experiment reported in the latest issue of the journal Science, shows that peptides, short protein chains, can form naturally under conditions that might plausibly have existed on the early earth some four billion years ago. Dr. Gunther Wachtershauser was the chief author of the experiment.