No experiment started with no life has ever created life.

No, not even close... and no one has yet even accomplished the construction of a "living" anything from life-like constituent organic materials (e.g. starting with complex life-like proteins). The closest they have come is taking a life-produced living cell or egg cell and inserting altered DNA to get an engineered life form.

From "inorganic" materials, no. Actually, these experiments must begin with organic materials -- the definition of organic being, in chemistry, that the molecules must contain at least one carbon and one hydrogen atom. Prebiotic or abiotic organic molecules (that is, molecules which contain both carbon and hydrogen) are actually quite common, however, and form under a variety of nonbiological conditions. And the answer is, in a way, yes, and in a further way no. The commonly accepted definition of life must include: 1. The ability to grow 2. The ability to metabolize -- that is, the absorption of nutrients in order to power energetic chemical reactions within the organism 3. The ability to respond to stimuli 4. The (at least potential) ability to reproduce The first experiments with proto-life were done by Aleksandr Oparin, who discovered that abiotic molecules of lipids and proteins were capable of self-organising into tiny spheres under the right temperature conditions. He called these "coacervates". His work was continued by J.B.S. Haldane, and later by Sidney Fox of NASA. If other organic molecules, such as abiotic enzymes, exist in the same medium as these lipids or proteins, when they form spheres they can form around and thus come to contain some of the enzymes -- which can then be used to catalyse chemical reactions within these pseudo-cells, and the shell of the pseudo-cell is capable of selectively allowing "nutrient" chemicals to enter while containing the larger enzymes. These have now come to be called protobionts, and they are not actually difficult to assemble at all. More elaborate "empty cells", with a membrane structure very close to that of natural living bacteria and an internal cytoskeleton, have self-assembled in experiments run by Gerard Wong of University of California at Santa Barbara and a team of other researchers -- the paper is at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/288/5473/2035. Protobionts are able to grow, metabolise, respond to ambient temperature, and even reproduce to a limited extent, as when they come to a certain size they split. However, they cannot reproduce their internal enzymes, so eventually those become too diffuse to power the chemistry of daughter protobionts. The great leap of nonlife to life came with the ability to self-replicate both the shell and the contents, and that has not *yet* been done -- although there are currently experiments under way investigating the self-assembly of RNA from prebiotic components. A combination of self-assembled RNA and these protobionts would fulfill all the requirements. Edit to add: for those who take the fact that we have not yet completed the full process of building a cell "from the ground up" (so to speak) to mean that we will never be able to do so -- if we were to take "we have not done it *yet*" to inevitably mean "we cannot ever do it" in any field of science, the vast majority of our modern technology would not exist, including the computers we are using for this exchange. The fact is, we believe many things we have not done yet to be possible for us to do, as soon as we have learned enough. An interesting commentary on modern efforts: http://www.carlzimmer.com/articles/2004/articles_2004_Before_DNA.html