Co-author Dr Zita Martins, a chemist and astrobiologist from Imperial College London, believes their findings suggest that some of the chemicals that generated life on Earth came from meteorite bombardments. "We are not saying that only meteorites contributed to the building blocks of life," she said, "but it's a very great contribution." Other scientists, however, do not believe that meteoritic chemicals played such a significant role. According to Emeritus Professor Robert Shapiro of New York University, "They're a subunit of a subunit of DNA. My opinion is that their amounts were utterly unimportant and insignificant." Wikinews contacted Professor Paul Davies, a physicist and astrobiologist presently at Arizona State University, about the recent findings. While he agreed with the findings, he said that he thinks such discoveries are "a red herring in the origin of life story - a hangover from the Miller-Urey experiment. Life is all about information - its replication and processing."
Shapiro teaches at NY University.