[W]e are biochemically quite simple in comparison bacteria. Simpler than bacteria. In terms of our metabolic biochemistry we are really limited. ...[… - Nick Lane

We've had some success and quite a lot of failure too. ...[T]he problem we're having... is reproducing the successes we have had. The big problem... for anyone working on this is that hydrogen gas is not soluble in water at atmospheric pressure. What we really need to do to make this work is to ramp up the pressure in the system to 300 bars and then we need a continuous flow. For this to work you need a across a barrier. Then it should work. We don't know, and we haven't got the funding to build a high pressure reactor. We're collaborating with a group in Utrecht to do that. ...If we can do that experiment and then it fails, then my confidence that this would be a suitable possible origin of life would take a serious knock.

What I would say with some degree of certainty from the example of life on earth, is that if you simply have a population of bacteria... the chances of it giving rise to the kind of morphological complexity... we see in eukariotic cells, and we do not see in bacteria, is remote... because bacteria and archaea, if you look at the amount of , they dwarf the genetic variation that we see in Eukaryotes. They have explored genetic sequence space to orders of magnitude greater that Eukaryotes did, and despite exploring all of that space, they haven't come up with morphological complexity. ...[T]hey did through an endosymbiosis. ...It's rare between prokaryotes, rare to the point that we know of one example of free-living bacteria with bacterial cells living inside it. We know of two other examples where, there's a for example, which has inside its own cells... some gamma protein bacteria, with beta protein bacteria living inside them. It's a little bit of a strange system and it's hard to know, again, can you generalize from this, because it's all inside a Russian doll?

Now, if we get to complex life and we get beyond organic life forms into artificial intelligence, post-biological, then anything goes and maybe that's what we should be looking for.