The Origin of Life Circulars, Metabolism First Versus Replication First

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In the last five years a lot of people have started to take it much more seriously, and these experiments are being done now. Andd what do we see? We see exactly the the molecules of the central metabolic pathways. We see the creb cycle intermediates. Wesee the ameno acids. We see basically life's chemistry, all just happening from c o two and hydrogen. And it's just gob smackingly beautiful to watch. It is a physics problem, really. It's just hemo dynamics and kinetics as it dynamical. That's hin of all it does, god.

The origin of life here on Earth was an important and fascinating event, but it was also a long time ago and hasn’t left many pieces of direct evidence concerning what actually happened. One set of clues we have comes from processes in current living organisms, especially those processes that seem extremely common. The Krebs cycle, the sequence of reactions that functions as a pathway for energy distribution in aerobic organisms, is such an example. I talk with biochemist about the importance of the Krebs cycle to contemporary biology, as well as its possible significance in understanding the origin of life.

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Nick Lane received his PhD from the Royal Free Hospital Medical School. He is currently a professor of Evolutionary Biochemistry at University College London. He was a founding member of the UCL Consortium for Mitochondrial Research, and is Co-Director of the UCL Centre for Life’s Origin and Evolution. He was awarded the 2009 UCL Provost’s Venture Research Prize, the 2011 BMC Research Award for Genetics, Genomics, Bioinformatics and Evolution, the 2015 Biochemical Society Award, and the 2016 Royal Society Michael Faraday Prize and Lecture. His new book is Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death.

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