Robert Shapiro (28 November 1935 – 15 June 2011[1]) was professor emeritus of chemistry at New York University.
He is best known for his work on the origin of life, having written two books on the topic: Origins, a Skeptic’s Guide to the Creation of Life on Earth (1986) and Planetary Dreams (1999).
Instead, he proposed that life arose from some self-sustaining and compartmentalized reaction of simple molecules: "metabolism first" instead of "RNA first".
This reaction would have to be able to reproduce and evolve, eventually leading to RNA.
He claimed that in this view life is a normal consequence of the laws of nature and potentially quite common in the universe.