The element boron is required for the formation of ribonucleic acid, an important basic building block of life. According to James Stephenson, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Hawaii's NASA Astrobiology Institute, "Boron may have been important for the origin of life on Earth because it stabilizes nucleic acid, which is an important component of ribonucleic acid. In early life, ribonucleic acid was thought to be the informational precursor to deoxyribonucleic acid."