Most people know who their grandparents are, and some know their great-grandparents. If you keep going back, though, you'll reach a point where your ancestors were not humans, nor even primates, nor animals, nor any life we know of today – “they” would just be some organic molecules on the early Earth, about to undergo drastic chemical changes that would mark the beginning of the first life forms. How did this transition from chemicals to life take place, and how do we know? While the origin of life is still mostly a mystery, scientists are full of ideas on how it may have happened. In this class, I will explore some of those ideas, including how to make the building blocks of proteins and DNA, then how to put those building blocks together in a simple, single-celled organism.