The pathways for the spontaneous emergence of life, on Earth or elsewhere, are not known.
Likewise, it is unclear how to assemble even a primitive living system from scratch. These two
fundamental open challenges are pursued in two separate research fields, which however have
many basic questions in common, e.g., what minimal sets of ingredients suffice to make primitive
living systems, and how such systems evolve over time. The BioChEm program will bring together
researchers from both fields, to discuss experimental, computational, and theoretical approaches
to these questions, as well as recent results and future directions.