‘What would scientists learn if they could run studies that lasted for hundreds or thousands of years—or more?’. In other words, rather than being forced to look at what nature has produced after hundreds of millions of years of evolution, etc., and to infer what might have happened to produce the extant situation, what experiments could you undertake to get evidence for one interpretation or another? This poser was posed by Davide Castelvecchi in Scientific American and received some interesting suggestions. Although most aren’t sufficiently botanical for this blog, that from Robert Hazen – ‘earth scientist at George Mason University (USA)’, and arguably the scientific American – is. He would like to run a 10 000-year series of experiments aiming to solve nothing short of the mystery of the origin of life on Earth, that pivotal moment(s) that created (yep, evolution of living things needs an initial act of ‘creation’ – spontaneous or otherwise…) what we now call biology (i.e. botany and all those other – lesser – life sciences). In a mimic of self-replicating molecules first assembling on the surface of rocks – the ‘most plausible explanation [of life’s origin]’ – Hazen envisages chemical ‘labs-on-chips’ containing hundreds of microscopic wells, each with different combinations of compounds reacting on a variety of mineral surfaces acting as ‘molecular nurseries’. Although I’m a great believer that funding should last for the lifetime of a project, I doubt that any research grant awarder’s coffers will be this deep. Pity.