As cool as it sounds when scientists tell you XYZ are responsible for life formation, you cannot make it a recipe to create life in such a way that bakers do where you add water with carbon, nitrogen, calcium, phosphorus, and trace elements to form a baby. While there is a long list of life requirement, they are not like those recipe books that teach you how to bake and cook and it is more complex than what you see on ingredient labels of stuffs you buy in the shop.
There are a lot of things responsible for life and they go far beyond the Carbon, Nitrogen, Calcium and so on that you think. You might have checked packs of different foods and see some strange names like lysine, phenylalanine, methionine, tyrosine, and son, and you wonder if these things are good for you or outright harmful but reality is they are the stuffs needed for life, molecules that make up what builds us, keep us strong, able to move about, perform activities, read, store energy, see, and think.
When you are focused on oxygen and carbon, you neglect other vital things like nucleic acids, proteins, lipids, carbohydrate, and even cofactors like alpha-(5,6-Dimethylbenzimidazolyl) cyanocobamide and so on. Before we learned about what we know today, ancient scholars had a different thought about what made life. They believed that everything on earth was made from earth, water, fire, and air but they were wrong and today we have a more detailed but complicated understanding of life.
We know today that we are made of cells which are made up of molecules, which comes from smaller atoms but in all, all living being have 97% of all their make up from four chemical which are carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen, with 1% being sulfur and phosphorus, and the remaining 2% being potassium, sodium, calcium, magnesium, chlorine, iron, copper, cobalt, and other trace element. It isn't like we have all the naturally occurring elements in us, in fact out of 98 naturally occurring element, only about 30 elements are essential to some form of life.
If we are to look at life, we know that we are carbon based organisms but why carbon and not silicon which also has 4 electron in its outer shell and is just beneath carbon in the periodic table? This is because the chemistry of carbon allows it to bond into variety of shapes and other atoms which is why it bonds to almost everything including DNA, protein, Amino acids, Sugar and so on but Silicon doesn't have this property. While we can use silicon for a lot of things, it isn't important for life. For instance, 2 oxygen atoms combined with carbon gives carbon dioxides which helps with plant survival but the same 2 oxygen atoms combined with silicon will give silica (sand).
While we can say that the backbone of living things is carbon, we cannot neglect hydrogen and oxygen. Early life was formed in sea and it explains why hydrogen and oxygen dominates. We are made up of 75% liquid when we are born but this starts to decrease as we grow older until 55%. We are made up of water from our muscles, skin, and even our bones are made of liquid and in the body, the liquid is a combination of water, and ions like sodium, chloride, and potassium and these ions are responsible for our cells not collapsing as well as send electrical signals to our nervous system.
As an adult, there are about 60 elements detectable in your body ranging from the ones you know, to the ones you think are toxic like Arsenic, lithium, mercury, to radioactive ones. This is thanks to our environment, diet, and every other thing around us. We are a complex form and we live a complex life of surviving to see the next day before we die and become carbon and other element source to other forms of life.
READ MORE
https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/15589861
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4342972/
https://sciencenotes.org/elements-in-the-human-body-and-what-they-do/
https://www.open.edu/openlearn/mod/oucontent/view.php
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK482447/
https://www.physio-pedia.com/Electrolytes
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10727122/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK26883/
