Is Life a Guide to Life's Origin?

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Can we use life as a guide to its own origin, or is there some kind of circularity to that ar and i think for the last 50 or 60 years, people have avoided that question. If you assume these pathways are more or less just spontaneous chemistry and should happen any way in the right environment, then all the genes really need to do when they emerge is just speed up processes that are happening anyway. And so if basically thinking thatth t thano, the basic metapolic pathways life, is just spontaneous chemistry in theright environment, really solves a lot of problems.

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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