Plasma - The Origin of *In*organic Life?

Plasma, like we get at the hospital (or give at the blood bank)?
No, no, no, not that plasma... We're talking about plasma like the ones generated by lightning, in each pixel of your plasma TV, or on the surface of the sun. (As you may know, I work with such plasmas doing engineering research...)
Well apparently there is some recent evidence that inorganic materials may be 'coaxed into life', for lack of a better metaphor, by exposure to plasma, and culturing under the right conditions. Don't worry, nobody has made an insect out of silicon (or even a paramecium), yet...
But the work published by researchers from the Russian Academy of Science indicates that "space dust" which interacts with a plasma ("space lightning") can undergo self-reorganization to form helical structures which strongly resemble a little something called DNA... And not only do these structures form on their own, but they can COPY themselves. The paper goes on to suggest that the plasma is acting as an evolutionary catalyst ("evolyst"?), intimating that lightning or the aurora borealis (or some other terrestrial plasma) may have had quite a big hand in furthering evolution of organic life on Earth!

Plasma is so cool...