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The probability for any particular life form to evolve seems vanishingly small, yet Earth is full of them. Given enough time and an ever so small pressure, or tendency, for matter to organise itself it can be argued that the emergence of life is inevitable.
As I have alluded above, molecular biology is not the prism through which we will be able to discover and understand the nature of life. Just like we cannot understand the function of the etax program by studying transistor patterns on a microchip. DNA molecules and base pairs and amino acids and even proton gradients are mere implementation details. They are essential, but they're not the big picture.
I think the big picture has to do with information – its storage, transmission and interpretation. Having only fairly recently been inducted into the circle of physical entities I think information itself is the key to understanding life, and it will take cutting-edge physics to understand information.
If anyone can explain life it'll be a physicist.
Cheers
Steffen.
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