Creating ideal conditions for life
That question was asked in 1953 by a classic experiment by Miller and his mentor Urey. You can find it on Wikipedia under "Miller_Urey_experiment" 
Basically they zapped basic molecular building blocks to life with electricity and more complex molecules (amino acids) formed. 
The experiment, with updates is nicely discussed here.
The experiment showed that the molecules required for life could be formed spontaneously on Earth from lightning. You would need amino acids, but also bipolar lipids, which can spontaneously form compartments. However, attempting to create life this way would not be worth attempting for two reasons, relating to time and scale. First (time), life has evolved only one time on Earth over 4 billion years. Second the scale of the entire Earth over billions of years is a pretty big experimental "test tube". It happened once in all this time, over all that space. A small side-issue; the fact that the codon table is optimized (and pretty universal, with only small differences), such that common amino acids have more ways to make them (more codons), and codons close to stop codons are for rare amino acids. This indicates that some early life experimented with alternative suboptimal codes that didn't make it.