When Geoff started analyzing leaf waxes, he hadn’t consciously been looking for compounds in living organisms that are likely to survive in sediments, attacking his Derbyshire question from its other end, as is now a standard ploy in biomarker studies. But when he returned from the Canaries in 1961, it began to dawn on him that this was, in fact, what he had done. It also became apparent that he was not alone in his curiosity about the fate of organic compounds in things like rocks and tars. In fact, he had some very good company. Two prominent Nobel chemists gave talks in Glasgow that year, both posing fundamental questions about the stuff of life. And both, Geoff found, shared his maverick interest in the organic chemistry of rocks and oils. Sir Robert Robinson sought to resolve the apparent paradox of petroleum, which appeared to have formed from the buried detritus of plants and algae that had been subjected to high pressures and temperatures, and yet also contained organic compounds that were quite different from any known in plants and algae. And Melvin Calvin, who had discovered how CO2 is converted to organic molecules in photosynthesis, talked about the origin of life. Experiments done in the past decade had given new meaning to such questions, by showing that simple organic chemicals could form spontaneously under conditions similar to those that were likely to have prevailed on the early, prebiotic earth. The mystery of life’s origin suddenly seemed approachable, and discussions had shifted from the purely theoretical and philosophical toward the empirical, and from the paleontological to the chemical. On the contemporary earth, life has something of a monopoly on making organic compounds. But if amino acids and sugars, the basic building blocks of living things, were produced by other than living things on the early earth, before the advent of life, then one could imagine the world before photosynthesis, before bacterial chemosynthesis. One could imagine some form of chemical evolution that predated Darwin’s biological evolution and launched the simplest, most primitive of bacteria. And one could look to the oldest rocks for evidence.