#16 Lee Cronin - How To Create Life From Scratch
Bold Conjectures with Paras Chopra
English - June 16, 2021 09:00 - 1 hour - 53 MB - ★★★★★ - 5 ratingsScience science physics consciousness reality economy psychology evolution Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
The best way to understand how life arose on Earth is to try to create it in a lab. But can we do it?
Lee Cronin at the Glasgow University is trying to do make the simplest life possible using nothing but inorganic chemicals.
== What we talk about ==
0:04 - Introduction
1:16 - How did you become interested in the origin of life?
5:37 - How close are we to finding out the origin of life?
10:22 - The definition of life
17:47 - Low & high information objects
21:05 - Is the process of life a continuum?
24:53 - How will we know we've found life if it's too alien (say made of inorganic molecules)? 30:19 - What is the assembly theory?
44:06 - How inorganic chemicals become self-replicating systems?
48:32 - How far are we from starting a new branch of life on Earth?
50:19 - Why is all life on Earth DNA based? Why not a variety?
55:05 - Do you have any hopes that we will find life on Mars?
57:29 - What are the minimum viable conditions which have to be there for life to exist?
1:04:04 - What is a chemical computer?
1:08:42 - What is a chemical computer good for?
1:11:16 - Can you use your assembly theory to reverse engineer any chemical and then make it?
1:15:11 - What’s the reaction of the chemistry community on the work you are doing?
== About the guest ==
Professor Lee Cronin is the Regius Chair of Chemistry in the School of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow, UK.
He is interested in the intersection of computation, life and chemistry. His research group is trying to recreate life from scratch by mimicking the atmospheric and terrestrial conditions of early Earth. In his pursuit of figuring out how life arises, Prof Lee Cronin has ended up pushing chemistry to its limits, the most recent manifestation of which is the chemputer - a computer that can be programmed to synthesize almost any chemical you can imagine.
Unlike many other scientists who study the origin of life, he is unique in his approach in trying to study life from its inorganic precursors - that is, how can complex organic molecules that life needs can form from inorganic molecules that get formed in the core of stars.