"We've had some success and quite a lot of failure too. ...[T]he problem we're having... is reproducing the successes we have had. The big problem... for anyone working on this is that hydrogen gas is not soluble in water at atmospheric pressure. What we really need to do to make this work is to ramp up the pressure in the system to 300 bars and then we need a continuous flow. For this to work you need a across a barrier. Then it should work. We don't know, and we haven't got the funding to build a high pressure reactor. We're collaborating with a group in Utrecht to do that. ...If we can do that experiment and then it fails, then my confidence that this would be a suitable possible origin of life would take a serious knock."