There's not really any single paper about it, so much as it being one of the most commonly held beliefs among biologists looking at how life might originate.

There are a lot of variations to the idea too though: some might argue that DNA came first, while others suggest that life actually started with proteins, and DNA/RNA came later. So far as I understand, the protein theory is most widely supported, and is partly why scientists get excited when they find amino acids somewhere.

Not really. It was grown in highly specific conditions in a lab. If it got out, it would probably be broken down incredibly quickly.

Yup. Its theorised that that was how life originally came about too: self-replicating nucleotide structures. All the other stuff came afterwards as imperfect copying resulted in changes (and increasing complexity) over time.

You misspelled burned.

> Still, slowing down to match orbit with the ISS is something that's gonna cost you a ton of fuel either way

Aerobraking, as you suggest, is the answer. It's how we used to do it for a long time before more effective technology and better understanding of orbital trajectories came along.

That's really not a big problem. Coming back fro somewhere like Mars, you'd need to alter the tragectory by a fraction of a degree to flip the reentry trajectory 180^0.

From there, you could bleed off speed like in early space missions with rounds of aerobraking.

The original commenter makes a good point about fuel weight, but its also got less to go wrong if you just slam the vehicle into the atmosphere one time.

> would have diagnosed the issues within a couple of days, such as a case of amoebic meningitis

If a patient at my hospital had any form of meningitis suspected, and didn't have lumbar puncture results with the doctor in less that 6 hours, heads would be rolling (no pun intended) I remember one case where the patient had to wait over 8 hours for the results (not my labs fault) and multiple people ended up facing disciplinares. Meningitis can kill, fast. Taking your time to diagnose it will result in needless patient deaths.

It's tangentially related, but people don't realise just how accurate and consistent DNA replication is. I don't have the error rate for humans, but E.coli is 1 error every ~1,000,000,000,000 replications (give or take a 0. I also asume DNA error correction is taken into account here) For context, humans have ~3,200,000,000 nucleotides.

This incredibly low error rate means that organisms that are related to each, even if a common ancestor was a few dozen generations ago, will have very similar DNA. As a result, the broad "99.9%" statistic would likely be accurate for both coding and non-coding DNA.