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And now, dear friends, here s Batul Kachar.
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What is the phylogenetic tree or the evolutionary tree of life?
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And what can we learn by running it back and studying ancient gene sequences as you have?
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I think phytogenetic trees could be one of the most romantic and beautiful notions that can come out of biology.
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It shows us a way to depict the connectedness of life and all living beings with one another.
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It itself is an ever-evolving notion.
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Biologists like visualizations.
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They like these graphics, these diagrams, and tree of life is one of them.
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So the tree starts at a common ancestor.
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It s actually the other way around.
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It starts from- At the end?
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It starts from the branches.
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It starts from the tip of the branch, actually.
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And then depending on what you collected to build the tree.
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So depending on the branches, depending on what s on the tip of the branch, and I will explain what I mean, the root will be determined by what is really sitting on the tip of the branch of the tree.
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So we could study the leaves of the tree by looking at what we have today and then start to reverse engineer, start to move back in time to try to understand what the rest of the tree, what the roots of the tree look like.
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Exactly, so the tree itself, by just taking a few steps back and looking at the entire tree itself, can give you an idea about the connectedness, the relatedness of the organisms, or whatever, again, you use to create your tree.
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There are different ways, but in this case, I m imagining
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entire diversity of life today is sitting on the tips of the branches of this tree.
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And we look at biologists, look at the tree itself, we like to think of it as the topology of the tree to understand when certain organisms or their ancestry may have merged over time.
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depending on the tools you use, you might use this tree to then reconstruct the ancestors as well.
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And so what are the different ways to do the reconstruction?
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So you can do that at the gene level, or you could do it at the higher complex biology level, right?
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So in which way have you approached this fascinating problem?
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we approached it in every way we can.
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So it s the gene, could be protein, the product of the gene, or species, or could be even groups of species.
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It totally depends on what you want to do with your tree.
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If you want to understand certain
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past events, whether an organism exchanged a certain DNA with another one along the course of evolution, you can build your tree accordingly.
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If you rather use the tree to reconstruct or resurrect ancient DNA, which is what we do, then in our case, for instance, we do both gene, protein and species because we want to compare the tree that we create using these different information.
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Okay, well let me ask you the ridiculous question then.
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So how realistic is Jurassic Park?
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Can we study the genes of ancient organisms and can we bring those ancient organisms back?
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So the reason I ask that kind of ridiculous sounding question is maybe it gives us context of what we can and can t do by looking back in time.
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Yeah, so dinosaurs or all these mammals, at least for us,
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the exciting thing already happened by the time we hit to larger organisms or to eukaryotes.
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Oh, to you, the fun stuff is before we got to the mammal?
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The fun stuff is what people think is boring, I think.
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The phase that s, well, there s two different times in the geologic history.
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One is the first life, past origin of life, how did first life look like?
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And the second is why do we think that over certain periods of geologic time, no significant innovation happened to the degree of leaving no record behind?
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So what do we not have a record of?
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Which part?
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So you say, the fun stuff to you is after the origin of life, which we ll talk about.
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After the origin of life, there s single cell organisms, the whole thing with the photosynthesis, the whole thing with the eukaryotes and multi-cell organisms, and what else is the fun stuff?
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The whole oxygen thing, which mixes in with the origin of life.
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There s a bunch of different inventions, all that have to do with this primitive kind of looking organisms.
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that we don t have a good record of?
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So I will tell you the more interesting things for us.
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One is the origin of life or what happened right following the emergence of life.
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How did the first cells look like?
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And then pretty much anything that we think shaped the environment and was shaped by the environment in a way that impacted the entire planet that enabled you and I to have this conversation.
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We have very little understanding of the biological innovations that took place in the past of this planet.
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We work with a very limited set of, I don t want to even say data, because they are fossil records.
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So let s say imprints, either that comes from the rock and the rock record itself,
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or what I just described, these trees that we create and whatever we can infer about the past.
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So we have two distinct ways that comes from geology and biology, and they each have their limitations.
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Okay, so, right, so there s an interplay, the geology gives you that little bit of data, and then the biology gives you that little bit of kind of constraints in the materials you get to work with to infer how does this result in the kind of data that we re seeing.
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And now we can have this through the fog, we can see, we can look back hundreds of millions of years, a couple of billion years and try to infer.
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Even further, and I like that you said fog, it is pretty foggy, and it gets foggier and foggier the further you try to see into the past.
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Biology is, you basically study the survivors, broadly speaking, and you re trying to sort of put together their history based on whatever you can recover today.
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What makes biology fascinating also let it s
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erased its own history in a way, right?
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So you work with this four billion year product, that s genome, that s the DNA, it s great, it s a very dynamic, ever evolving chemical thing.
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And so you will get some information, but you re not gonna get much unless you know where to look, because it is responding to the environment.
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Yeah, so what we have, it s fascinating, what we have is the survivors, the successful organisms, even the primitive ones, even the bacteria we have today.
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So bacteria is not primitive, and we- Sorry, sorry to offend the bacteria.
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We should be very grateful to bacteria.
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First of all, they are our great, great ancestors.
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I like this quote by Douglas Adams, humans don t like their ancestors, they rarely invite them over for dinner, right?
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But bacteria is in your dinner.
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Bacteria is in your gut.
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Bacteria is helping you along the way.
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So we do invite them for dinner.
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Well, they get themselves invited in a way.
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And they re definitely older and definitely very sophisticated, very resilient than anything else.
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As someone working as a bacteriologist, I feel like I need to
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defend them in this case because they don t get much shout out when we think about life.
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So you do study bacteria, so which organisms gives you hints that are alive today that give you hints about what ancient organisms were like?
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Is it bacteria, is it viruses?
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What do you study in the lab?
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We study a variety of different bacteria, depending on the questions that we ask.
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We engineer bacteria.
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So ideally, we want to work with bacteria that we can engineer.
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Seldom we developed the tools to engineer them.
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And it depends on the question that we are interested in.
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If we are interested in connecting the biology and geology to understand the early life and fundamental innovations across billions of years,
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there are really good candidates like cyanobacteria.
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So we use cyanobacteria very frequently in the lab.
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We can engineer its genome, we can perturb its function by poking its own DNA with the foreign DNA that we engineer
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in the lab.
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We work with E. coli, it s the most simple in terms of model systems goes, organism that one can study, well-established, sort of a pet, lab pet, that we use it a lot for cloning and for understanding basic functions of the cell, given that it s really well studied.
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So, and what you do with that E. coli, you said that you inject it with foreign DNA?
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We inject pretty much all the bacteria that we work with, with foreign DNA.
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We also work with diazotrophs.
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These are azotobacteria.
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They re one of the prime nitrogen fixers, nitrogen-fixing bacteria.
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Can you explain what that is, nitrogen-fixing?
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Is that, is the source of its energy?
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So nitrogen is a triple bond gas that s pretty abundant in the atmosphere, but nitrogen itself cannot be directly utilized by cells given it is triple bond.
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It needs to be converted to ammonia that is then used for the downstream cellular functions.
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And that s what counts as nitrogen fixing.
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Converted to ammonia.
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Yes, so nitrogen needs to be fixed before our cells can make use of it.
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No offense to nitrogen either.
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Well, it s actually a very important element.
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It s one of the most abundant elements on our planet that is used by biology.
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It s in ATP, it s in chlorophyll that relies on nitrogen.
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So it s a very important enzyme for a lot of cell functions.
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And there s just one mechanism that evolution invented to convert it, to fix it?
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So far we know there s only one nitrogen fixation pathway, as opposed to, say, carbon.
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You can find up to seven or eight different carbon-based microbes invented to fix carbon.
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That s not the case for nitrogen.
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It s a singularity across geologic time.
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We think it evolved around 2.7, maybe.
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roughly three, probably less than three billion years ago.
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And that s the only way that nature invented to fix the nitrogen in the atmosphere for the subsequent use.
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Would we still have life as we know it today if we didn t invent that nitrogen fixing step?
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I cannot think of it, no.
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It s essential to life as we know.
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You and I are having this conversation because life found a way to fix nitrogen.
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Is that one of the tougher ones?
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If you put it sort of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, what are, in terms of being able to work with these elements, what is the hardest thing?
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What is the most essential for life?
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Just to give context.
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Well, we think of this as the cocktail, you may hear.
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What s in the cocktail?
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is the schnapps, right?
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Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur.
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So there are five elements that life relies on.
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We don t quite know whether that s the only out of many options that life necessarily needs to operate on, but that s just how it happened on our own planet.
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And there are many abiotic ways to fix nitrogen.
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and like lightning, right?
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Lightning can accumulate ammonia.
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Humans found a way about 100 years ago, I think around World War I, the Haber-Bosch process that we can abiotically convert nitrogen into ammonia.
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Actually, 50% of the nitrogen in our bodies comes from the human conversion of nitrogen to ammonia.
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it s the fertilizer that we use, urea, comes from that process.
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It s in our food.
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So we found a way to fix our own nitrogen for ourselves.
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Yeah, but that s way after the original invention of how to fix nitrogen.
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Oh, absolutely, absolutely.
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And without that, we wouldn t have all the steps of evolution along the way.
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Oh, absolutely.
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We tried to replicate
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in the most simplest way what nature has come up with.
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We do this by taking nitrogen using a lot of pressure and then generating ammonia.
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Life does this in a more sophisticated way, relying on one single enzyme called nitrogenase.
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It s the nitrogen that is used together with eight electron donor and ATP together with a lot of hydrogen.
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Life pushes this metabolism down to create fixed nitrogen.
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It s quite remarkable.
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So the lab pet E. coli, inject them with DNA, so E. coli does nitrogen fixing in part, or is that a different one?
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So some biological engineers engineered E. coli to fix nitrogen, I believe, not us.
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We use the nature s nitrogen fixing bug and engineer it with the nitrogen fixing metabolism that we resurrected using our computational and phylogenetic tools.
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How complicated are these little organisms?
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What are we talking about?
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It depends on how we define complication.
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Okay, so I can tell that you appreciate and respect the full complexity of even the most seemingly primitive organisms, because none of them are primitive.
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Okay, that said, what kind of, what are we talking about?
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How,
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What kind of machineries do they have that you re working with when you re injecting them with DNA?
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So I will start with one of the most fascinating machineries that we target, which is the translation machinery.
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It is a very unique subsystem of cellular life in comparison to, I would say, metabolism.
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And we used to, when we are thinking about cellular life, we think of cell as the basic unit or the building block.
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But from a key perspective, that s not the case.
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That one may argue that everything that happens inside the cell serves the translation and the translation machinery.
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There is a nice paper that called this that the entire cell is hopelessly addicted to this main informatic, computing, biological, chemical system that is operating at the heart of the cell.
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Which is the translation?
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It is the translation.
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What s the translation from what to what?
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So RNA to enzymes?
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converts a linear sequence of mRNA into a later folded protein.
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That s the core processing center for information for life.
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It has multiple steps.
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It initiates, it elongates, it terminates, and it recycles.
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it operates discrete bits of information.
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It s itself is like a chemical decoding device.
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And that is incredibly unique for translation that I don t think you will find anywhere else in the cell that does this.
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So even though it s called translation, it s really like a factory that reads the schematic
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and builds a three-dimensional object.
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It s like a printer.
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I would divide it into actually even four more additional steps or disciplines than what would it take to study it by the way you described it.
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It s a chemical system.
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It s the compounds that make it up, or chemicals.
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It s physical.
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It tracks the energy to make its job, to do its job.
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It s informatic.
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What is processed are the bits.
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It s computational.
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the discrete states that the system is placed when the information is being processed, that itself is computational, and it s biological.
1
SPEAKER_01
There s variability and inheritance that come from imperfect replication even and imperfect computation.
1
SPEAKER_00
Oh man, that s so good.
1
SPEAKER_00
So from the biology comes the, like when you mess up, the bugs are the features, that s the biology.
1
SPEAKER_00
Informatics is obvious in the RNA, that s a set of information there.
1
SPEAKER_00
The different steps along the way is actually kind of what the computer does with bits.
1
SPEAKER_00
It s done computation, physical, there s a
1
SPEAKER_00
I guess almost like a mechanical process to the whole thing that requires energy and actually it s manipulating actual physical objects and chemicals because you have to, ultimately it s all chemistry.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and it tracks this information.
1
SPEAKER_01
So it is almost a mini computer device inside ourselves.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
1
SPEAKER_01
And that s the oldest computational device of life.
1
SPEAKER_01
It s likely the key
1
SPEAKER_01
operation system that had to evolve for life to emerge.
1
SPEAKER_00
It s more interesting or it s more complicated in interesting ways than the computers we have today.
1
SPEAKER_00
I mean, everything you said, which is really, really nice.
1
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I guess our computers have the informatic and they have the computational, but they don t have the chemical, the physical or the biology.
1
SPEAKER_01
Exactly.
1
SPEAKER_01
And the computers don t have, don t link information to function.
1
SPEAKER_01
Right, they are not tightly coupled, nowhere close to what translation or the way translation does it.
1
SPEAKER_01
So that s the number one, I think, difference between the two.
1
SPEAKER_01
And yes, it s informatic and we can discuss this further too.
1
100%.
1
SPEAKER_00
Let s please discuss this further.
1
SPEAKER_00
Which part are we discussing further?
1
SPEAKER_00
Each one of those are fascinating worlds, each of the five.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, so well, we can start with the more, I guess, the ones that are more established, which is the chemical aspect of the translation machinery.
1
SPEAKER_01
The specific compounds make up the assembly of RNA.
1
SPEAKER_01
Chemists showed this in many different ways.
1
SPEAKER_01
We can rip apart the entire machinery.
1
SPEAKER_01
We know that at the core of it, there s an RNA that s,
1
SPEAKER_01
that operates not only as an information system itself or information itself, but also as an enzyme.
1
SPEAKER_01
And origin of life chemists make these molecules easily now.
1
SPEAKER_01
We know we can manipulate RNA, we can make, even with single pot chemistries, we can create compounds.
1
SPEAKER_00
What s a single pot chemistry?
1
SPEAKER_01
I would say when you add all the recipes that you know that will lead you to the final product, all in one container.
1
SPEAKER_00
This is what original life chemists do, is they come up with this pot, they throw a bunch of chemicals in, and they try to, they re basically chefs of a certain kind.
1
SPEAKER_01
I m not sure if that s what they call it, but that s how I think of it, because it is all combined in a test tube, and you know the outcome, and it s very mathematical.
1
SPEAKER_01
Once you know the right environment and the right chemistry that needs to get into this container or this pot, you know what the outcome is.
1
SPEAKER_01
There is no luck there anymore.
1
SPEAKER_01
It s a pretty rigid, established input-output system, and it s all chemistry.
1
SPEAKER_00
So you actually wear a lot of hats.
1
SPEAKER_00
Is one of them original life chemists?
1
SPEAKER_01
My PhD is in chemistry, but I don t do origin of life chemistry.
1
SPEAKER_00
But you re interested in origin of life.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yes, absolutely.
1
SPEAKER_00
So some of your best friends are origin of life chemists.
1
SPEAKER_01
Just make sure that you have good chemist friends if you re interested in origin of life.
1
SPEAKER_01
That s 100% required.
1
SPEAKER_01
It should be mandatory.
1
SPEAKER_00
Okay, so chemistry, so what else about this machinery that we need to know chemically?
1
SPEAKER_01
Well,
1
SPEAKER_01
Chemically, I think that s it.
1
SPEAKER_01
You have enzymes, you have proteins.
1
SPEAKER_01
Enzymes are doing their thing.
1
SPEAKER_01
They know how to chew energy using ATP or GTP.
1
SPEAKER_01
They know what to do in their own way.
1
SPEAKER_01
They do their enzymatic thing.
1
SPEAKER_01
So it s not just the ribosome that is at the heart of the transition, but there are a lot of different proteins.
1
SPEAKER_01
You re looking about a hundred different components that compose this machinery.
1
SPEAKER_00
Well, let me ask, maybe it s a ridiculous question, but did the chemistry make this machine, or did the machine use chemistry to achieve a purpose?
1
SPEAKER_00
So like, I guess there s a lot of different chemical possibilities on Earth.
1
SPEAKER_00
Is this translation machinery just like picking and choosing different chemical reactions that it can use to achieve a purpose?
1
SPEAKER_00
or did the chemistry basically, there s like a momentum, like a constraint to the thing that can only build a certain kind of machinery?
1
SPEAKER_00
Basically, is chemistry fundamental or is it just emergent?
1
SPEAKER_00
How important is chemistry to this whole process?
1
SPEAKER_01
You cannot have life without chemistry.
1
SPEAKER_01
You cannot have any cellular process without chemistry.
1
SPEAKER_01
What makes life interesting is that even if the chemistry is imperfect, even if there are accidents along the way, if something binds to another chemical in a way it shouldn t, there is resilience within the system that it can maybe not necessarily repair itself, but it moves on, however imperfect mistakes can be handled.
1
SPEAKER_00
That s where the biology comes in.
1
SPEAKER_01
That s where the biology comes in.
1
SPEAKER_01
But in terms of chemistry, you absolutely cannot have a translation machinery without chemistry.
1
SPEAKER_01
And so, as I said, there are four main steps.
1
SPEAKER_01
These are the core steps that are conserved in all translation machinery.
1
SPEAKER_01
And I should say, all life has this machine, right?
1
SPEAKER_01
Every cell, everything.
1
SPEAKER_00
On Earth.
1
SPEAKER_01
On Earth.
1
SPEAKER_00
On Earth.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
1
SPEAKER_00
When you think of this machine, do you think very specifically about the kind of machinery that we re talking about, or do you think more philosophically?
1
SPEAKER_00
A machine that converts information into function.
1
SPEAKER_01
I cannot separate the two.
1
SPEAKER_01
I think what makes this machinery fascinating is that those five components that I listed, they coexist.
1
SPEAKER_01
So, for instance, if we, let s just, talking about the chemistry part,
1
SPEAKER_01
we know the certain rate constant, all these proteins that operate in this machinery needs to harbor in order to get the mechanism going, right?
1
SPEAKER_01
If you are bringing the information to the translation machinery and you re the initiator,
1
SPEAKER_01
of this computation system.
1
SPEAKER_01
You need to have, you can only afford a certain range of mistakes.
1
SPEAKER_01
If you re too fast, then the next message cannot be delivered fast.
1
SPEAKER_01
If you re too slow, then you may stall the process.
1
SPEAKER_01
So there is definitely a chemistry constant going on within the machinery.
1
SPEAKER_01
Again, it s not perfect, far from it, but they all have their own margin of error that they can tolerate versus they cannot, otherwise the system collapses.
1
SPEAKER_00
So it s like a jazz ensemble, the notes or the chemistry, but you can be a little offbeat.
1
SPEAKER_01
I like that you said jazz, it s definitely true.
1
SPEAKER_01
It s a party and it s like everybody s invited and they need to operate together, right?
1
SPEAKER_01
And what s really cool about it, I think, there are many things that are very interesting about this thing, but if you remove it from the cell and put it in a cell-free environment,
1
SPEAKER_01
works just fine, right?
1
SPEAKER_01
So you can get cell-free translation systems, put this translation in a test tube and it is
1
SPEAKER_01
doing its thing.
1
SPEAKER_01
It doesn t need the rest of the cell to translate information.
1
SPEAKER_01
Of course, you need to feed the information, at least so far.
1
SPEAKER_01
But because we are far from evolving a translation, maybe not so far, evolving a translation in the lab, or a machinery that can process information as it generates it.
1
SPEAKER_01
We have not done that yet.
1
SPEAKER_00
It s a pretty complicated machinery, so it s hard for those origin of life chemists to find a pot that generates.
1
SPEAKER_01
Because it s far more than chemistry.
1
SPEAKER_01
You need biology, obviously.
1
SPEAKER_01
You need biochemistry.
1
SPEAKER_01
You need to think as a, I think, network systems folk.
1
SPEAKER_01
You need to think about computation.
1
SPEAKER_01
You need to think about information.
1
SPEAKER_01
And that is not happening yet, except we are trying to bring this perspective.
1
SPEAKER_01
But the more you understand how information systems work, you cannot, once you see it,
2
SPEAKER_01
You cannot unsee it.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s one of those things.
2
SPEAKER_00
But you can still rip it out and the chemistry happens.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yes, and chemistry can happen even if you strip some of the parts out.
2
SPEAKER_01
You can get very minimal level of information processing that does not look anything like the translation that cells relies on, but chemists showed from linear, you can generate information that arrives to a processing center in the form of a linear polymer.
2
SPEAKER_01
The informatic part of this system that I think sets it apart from computation and from metabolism comes in if you think about the information itself, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
So we have four nucleotide letters that compose DNA, and they are processed in the translation in triplets.
2
SPEAKER_01
So you have in triplet codon fragments.
2
SPEAKER_01
So you have four times four times four.
2
SPEAKER_01
So you have 64 possible states that can be encoded by four letters in three positions.
2
SPEAKER_00
All right, so- It s so amazing.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s so amazing.
2
SPEAKER_01
There is only one code that says start, that there s only one.
2
SPEAKER_01
And then there s two, if not three, that says stop.
2
SPEAKER_01
So that s what you work with.
2
SPEAKER_01
But you can have 64 possible states, but life only uses 20.
2
SPEAKER_01
amino acids.
2
SPEAKER_01
So life uses 64 possible states minus four of the starts and stops to code for 20 amino acids in different combinations.
2
SPEAKER_01
That is really amazing.
2
SPEAKER_01
If you think about there are 500 different amino acids life can choose, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
narrowed it down to 20.
2
SPEAKER_01
We don t know why.
2
SPEAKER_01
A lot of people think about this genetic code is quite fascinating.
2
SPEAKER_01
I mean, it didn t do it for four billion years.
2
SPEAKER_01
I don t know, we may wait for another four billion years.
2
SPEAKER_00
But you didn t have those amino acids in the very beginning, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
We don t know.
2
SPEAKER_01
So we would be fooling ourselves if we said we know exactly how many amino acids existed early on.
2
SPEAKER_01
But there s no reason to think that it wasn t the same.
2
SPEAKER_00
Or similar.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, we don t have a good reason.
2
SPEAKER_01
But because roughly 20 out of 60 states are used, you re using one third of your possible states in your information system.
2
SPEAKER_01
So this may seem like a waste, but informatically, it s important because it s abundant and it is redundant, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
So this code degeneracy, you see this in, that s implemented by this translation machinery inside the cell.
2
SPEAKER_01
So it means you can make errors, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
You can make errors, but the message will still get through.
2
SPEAKER_01
You can speak missing some letters, the information can miss some parts, but the message will still get through.
2
SPEAKER_01
So that s two thirds of the not used states gives you that robustness and resilience within the system.
2
SPEAKER_00
So at the informatic level, there s room for error.
2
SPEAKER_00
There s probably room for error probably in all five.
2
SPEAKER_00
categories that we re talking about.
2
SPEAKER_00
There s probably room for error in the computation, there s probably room for error in the physical.
2
SPEAKER_00
Everywhere there s room for error.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, because the informatic capacity is made possible together with the other components.
2
SPEAKER_01
And not only that, but also the product yields a function null, in this case enzyme or protein, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
So that s really amazing to me.
2
SPEAKER_00
It is, I mean, in my head, just so you know, because I m a computer science AI person, the parallels between even like language models that encode language, or now they re able to encode basically any kind of thing, including images and actions, all in this kind of way.
2
SPEAKER_00
The parallel in terms of informatic and computation is just incredible.
2
SPEAKER_01
Actually, I have an image maybe I can send you.
2
SPEAKER_00
Can we pull it up now?
2
SPEAKER_01
If you just do genetic codon charts, we can pull that up.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it s a very standard table.
2
SPEAKER_01
So I can explain why this is so amazing.
2
SPEAKER_01
So you re looking at, like, this is life s alphabet, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
And so I also want to make a very quick link now to your first question, the tree of life.
2
SPEAKER_01
When we try to understand ancient languages or the cultures that use these extinct languages, we start with the modern languages, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
So we look at Indo-European languages and try to understand certain words and make trees to understand, you know, this is what Slavic word is for snow, something like snig.
2
SPEAKER_00
Now we jumped to languages that humans spoke, human history.
2
SPEAKER_01
Exactly.
2
SPEAKER_01
So we make trees to understand what is the original ancestor, what did they use to say snow.
2
SPEAKER_01
And if you have a lot of cultures who use the word snow, you can imagine that it was snowy, that s why they needed that word.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s the same thing for biology, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
If we understand some function about that enzyme, we can understand the environment that they lived in.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s similar in that sense.
2
SPEAKER_01
So now you re looking at the alphabet of life.
2
SPEAKER_01
In this case, it s not 20 or 25 letters.
2
SPEAKER_01
You have four letters.
2
SPEAKER_01
So what is really interesting that stands out to me when I look at this, on the outer shell, you re looking at the 20 amino acids that compose life, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
The one, the methionine that you see, that s the start.
2
SPEAKER_01
So the start is always the same.
2
SPEAKER_01
To me, that is fascinating that all life starts with the same start.
2
SPEAKER_01
There s no other start code.
2
SPEAKER_01
So you sent the AUG to the cell that when that information arrives, the translation knows, all right, I got to start, function is coming.
2
SPEAKER_01
Following this is a chain of information until the stop
2
SPEAKER_01
code arrives which highlights it in black squares.
2
SPEAKER_00
So for people just listening, we re looking at a standard RNA color table organized in a wheel.
2
SPEAKER_00
There s an outer shell and there s an inner shell all used in the four letters that we re talking about.
2
SPEAKER_00
And with that, we can compose all of the amino acids and there s a start and there s a stop and presumably you put together
2
SPEAKER_00
with these letters you walk around the wheel to put together the words, the sentences that make.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, the words and sentences.
2
SPEAKER_01
And you, again, you get one start, you get three, there are three different ways to stop this, one way to start it.
2
SPEAKER_01
And for each letter, you have multiple options.
2
SPEAKER_01
So you say you have a code A, the second code can be another A. And even if you messed that up, you still can rescue yourself.
2
SPEAKER_01
So you can get, for instance, I m looking at the lysine K, you get an A and you get an A and then you get an A that gives you the lysine.
2
SPEAKER_01
But if you get an A and if you get an A and I get a G, you still get the license.
2
SPEAKER_01
So there are different combinations.
2
SPEAKER_01
So even if there s an error, we don t know if these are selected because they were erroneous and somehow they got locked down.
2
SPEAKER_01
We don t know if there is a mechanism behind this or we certainly don t know this definitively.
2
SPEAKER_01
But this is the informatic part of this.
2
SPEAKER_01
And notice that the colors, and in some tables too, the colors will be coded in a way that the type of the nucleotides can be similar chemically.
2
SPEAKER_01
But the point is that you will still end up with the same amino acids or something similar to it, even if you mess up the code.
2
SPEAKER_00
Do we understand the mechanism how natural selection interplays with this resilience to error?
2
SPEAKER_00
Which errors result in the same output, like the same function, and which don t?
2
SPEAKER_00
Which actually results in a dysfunction, or which are?
2
SPEAKER_01
We understand to some degree how translation and the rest of the cell work together, how an error at the translation level, this is the really core level, can impact entire cell.
2
SPEAKER_01
But we understand very little about the evolutionary mechanisms behind the selection of the system.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s thought to be as one of the hardest problems in biology, and it is still the dark side of biology, even though it is so essential.
2
SPEAKER_01
So this is, yeah, you re looking at the
2
SPEAKER_01
language of life, so to speak, and how it can found ways rather to tolerate its own mistakes.
2
SPEAKER_00
So the entire phylogenetic tree can be like deconstructed with this wheel of language.
2
SPEAKER_01
Because all the final letters, that s the 20 amino acids, that s our alphabet.
2
SPEAKER_01
They are all brought together with these bits of information, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
So when you look at the genes, you re looking at those four letters.
2
SPEAKER_01
When you look at the proteins, you re looking at the 20 amino acids, which may be a little easier way to track the information when we create the tree.
2
SPEAKER_00
So using this language, we can describe all life that s lived on Earth.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s one perspective.
2
SPEAKER_01
We are not that good at it yet, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
So in theory, this is one way to look at life on Earth.
2
SPEAKER_01
If you re a biologist and you want to understand how life evolved from a molecular perspective, this would be the way to do it.
2
SPEAKER_01
And this is what nature narrowed its code down to.
2
SPEAKER_01
So when we think of nitrogen, when we think of carbon, when we think of sulfur, it s all in this, that all these nucleotides are built based on those elements.
2
SPEAKER_00
And this is fundamentally the informatic perspective.
2
SPEAKER_01
Exactly, that s the informatic perspective.
2
SPEAKER_01
And it s important to emphasize that this is not engineered by humans.
2
SPEAKER_01
This evolved by itself.
2
SPEAKER_00
Like, right, humans didn t invent this just because we were just describing, trying to find, trying to describe the language of life.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it appears to be a highly optimized chemical and information code.
2
SPEAKER_01
It may indicate that a great deal of chemical evolution and biological evolution
2
SPEAKER_01
and this may indicate that a lot of selection pressure and Darwinian evolution happened with prior to the rise of last universal common ancestor, because this is almost a bridge that connects the earliest cells to the last universal common ancestor.
2
SPEAKER_00
Okay, can you describe what the heck you just said?
2
SPEAKER_00
So this
2
SPEAKER_00
mechanism evolved before the what common ancestor?
2
SPEAKER_00
The last universal common ancestor.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yes, so when we talk about the tree, when we think about the root, if you ideally included all the living information, all the available information that comes from living organisms on your tree, then on the root of your tree lies the last universal common ancestor, Leuka.
2
SPEAKER_00
Why last, last universal?
2
SPEAKER_00
Because the earlier universal, it also had trees, but they all died off.
2
SPEAKER_01
We call it the last because it is sort of the first one that we can track because we don t know what we cannot track, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
There was one organism that started the whole thing.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s more like a, I would think of it as more like a population, a group of organisms than a single.
2
SPEAKER_01
Okay, hold on a second.
2
SPEAKER_00
I tweeted this, so I wanna know the accuracy of my tweet.
2
SPEAKER_00
All right.
2
SPEAKER_00
Sometimes early in the morning, I tweet very pothead-like things.
2
SPEAKER_00
I said that we all evolved from one common ancestor that was a single cell organism 3.5 billion years ago.
2
SPEAKER_00
Something like this.
2
SPEAKER_00
How true is that tweet?
2
SPEAKER_00
Do I need to delete it?
2
SPEAKER_00
No, that s actually correct.
2
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I think, of course, there s a lot to say, which is like, we don t know exactly.
2
SPEAKER_00
But to what degree is that the single organism aspect, is that true versus multiple organisms?
2
SPEAKER_01
Do you want me to be
2
SPEAKER_00
Brutally honest?
2
SPEAKER_00
Yes, please.
2
SPEAKER_00
There s still time.
2
SPEAKER_00
This is how we get like caveats to tweets.
2
SPEAKER_01
So first of all, 3.5 is still a very conservative estimate.
2
SPEAKER_00
In which direction?
2
SPEAKER_01
I would say it s 3.8 is probably safer to say at this point.
2
SPEAKER_00
A bunch of people said it probably way before.
2
SPEAKER_01
If you put an approximately, I ll take that.
2
SPEAKER_00
I didn t.
2
SPEAKER_00
I just love the idea that I was once, first of all, as a single organism, I was once a cell.
2
SPEAKER_01
Well, you re still is.
2
SPEAKER_01
You re a group of cells.
2
SPEAKER_00
No, but I started from a single cell.
2
SPEAKER_00
Me, Lex.
2
SPEAKER_01
You mean like you versus Luca?
2
SPEAKER_01
Are you relating to Luca right now?
2
SPEAKER_00
No, no, no, I m relating to my, like Lex.
2
SPEAKER_00
Your own development.
2
SPEAKER_00
My own development.
2
SPEAKER_00
I started from a single cell.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s like, it like built up and stuff, okay.
2
SPEAKER_00
That, and then, so that s for a single biological organism.
2
SPEAKER_00
And then from an evolutionary perspective, the Luca, like I start, like my ancestor is a single cell.
2
SPEAKER_00
And then here I am sitting, half asleep, tweeting.
2
SPEAKER_00
Like I started from a single cell, evolved a ton of murder along the way to this brutal search for adaptation through the 3.5, .8 billion years.
2
SPEAKER_01
So you defy the code of Douglas Adams.
2
SPEAKER_01
You are proud of your ancestors and you invite them over to dinner and you invite them over to your Twitter.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, and it s amazing that this intelligence, to the degree you can call it intelligence, emerged to be able to tweet whatever the heck I want.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yes, it s almost intelligence at the chemical level, and this is also probably one of the first chemically intelligent system that evolved by itself in nature.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so you see that translation as a fundamentally intelligent mechanism.
2
SPEAKER_01
In its own way, and again, if we manage to figure out how to drive life s evolution, if it can evolve a sophisticated sort of informatic processing system like this, you may ask yourself, what might chemical systems
2
SPEAKER_01
be capable of independently doing under different circumstances.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so like locally, they re intelligent locally, they don t need the rest of the shebang, they don t need the big picture.
2
SPEAKER_01
They need, so that s a great segue into what makes this biological, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
The heart of the cellular activities are translation, you kill translation, you kill the cell.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
2
SPEAKER_01
Not only the transition itself, you kill the component that initiates it, you kill the cell.
2
SPEAKER_01
You remove the component that elongates it, you kill the cell.
2
SPEAKER_01
So there are many different ways to disrupt this machinery.
2
SPEAKER_01
All the parts are important.
2
SPEAKER_01
Now it can vary across different organisms.
2
SPEAKER_01
We see variation between bacteria versus eukaryotes versus archaea, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
So it is not the same exact steps, but
2
SPEAKER_01
and get more crowded as we get closer to eukaryotes, for instance.
2
SPEAKER_01
But you are still computing about 20 amino acids per second, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
This is what you re generating every second.
2
SPEAKER_00
That single machinery is doing 20 a second?
2
SPEAKER_01
21 for bacteria, I believe eight for eukaryotes, or nine.
2
SPEAKER_00
21 a second.
2
SPEAKER_00
I mean, that s super inefficient or super efficient, depending on how you think about it.
2
SPEAKER_01
I think it s great.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, but it s way slower than a computer could generate through simulation.
2
SPEAKER_01
I think, if you can show me a computer that does this, we are done here.
2
SPEAKER_00
Well, this is the big, this includes the five things, not just, but I could show you a computer that s doing the informatic.
2
SPEAKER_00
Right?
2
SPEAKER_01
Like- Yes, you can show me that, but you cannot show me the one that has all.
2
SPEAKER_00
For now.
2
SPEAKER_01
For now.
2
SPEAKER_00
I will ask you about probably what alpha fold, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
I think the more we learn about, and this is why early life and origin is also very fascinating and applicable to many different disciplines.
2
SPEAKER_01
There is no way you see this the way we just described it, unless you think about early life and early geochemistry and earliest emergence
3
SPEAKER_01
systems.
3
SPEAKER_01
But going back to the biological component, all of these attributes that we think about life or that we associate with biology stems from translation as well as metabolism.
3
SPEAKER_01
But
3
SPEAKER_01
I see metabolism as a way to keep translation going, and translation keeps metabolism going, but translation is arguably a bit more sophisticated process for the reasons that I just described.
3
SPEAKER_00
So metabolism is a source of energy for this translation process.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s a way to process materials and it is inherently dynamic and it is flexible, but it is not focused on repetition as translation does.
3
SPEAKER_01
So that s the main difference.
3
SPEAKER_01
Translation is kind of in a way just it repeats, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
So you have the metabolism that can synthesize materials,
3
SPEAKER_01
creates or benefits from available energy.
3
SPEAKER_01
And again, it s a dynamic system.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then you have computation that is inherently repetitive, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
Needs to carry out repetitive processes.
3
SPEAKER_01
And it does the tasks and it implements an algorithm, but it is not dynamic.
3
SPEAKER_01
So you see both of those attributes in translation combined.
3
SPEAKER_01
It is repetitive.
3
SPEAKER_01
and it is dynamic, and it also processes this information.
3
SPEAKER_01
So they are fundamentally different.
3
SPEAKER_01
I don t know if you can get life if you don t find a way to process the information around you.
3
SPEAKER_00
In a repetitive, dynamic way.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and somehow that s what got selected, maybe not selected, I don t know if it was accidental, but that s what it seems to be conserved for four billion years, that that s what life established.
3
SPEAKER_00
What s the connection between translation and the self-replication, which seems to be
3
SPEAKER_00
another weird thing that life just started doing, wanting to just replicate itself.
3
SPEAKER_01
I think when we truly understand the answer to that question, we may have just made ourselves life, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
I don t think we know quite how translation machinery as a whole fits into equation.
3
SPEAKER_01
So we try to understand ribosomes, RNA, how the linear information is processed.
3
SPEAKER_01
or the genetic code, why this codon s not others, why 20 not more, not less.
3
SPEAKER_01
And we are sort of moving towards transition, that s what we are working on anyway.
3
SPEAKER_01
To finally look at the patterns in which this system operates itself.
3
SPEAKER_01
And if you understand that, you re really unlocking a very emergent behavior.
3
SPEAKER_00
One of the things you didn t mention is physical.
3
SPEAKER_00
Is there something to mention about that component that s interesting?
3
SPEAKER_01
There s actually a paper published in 2013, I wanna say the first author is Zirnoff.
3
SPEAKER_01
So they surveyed computational engineered systems level computation energy consumption.
3
SPEAKER_01
And they tried to understand whether the universe is using its own, or life is using its full capacity of energy consumption.
3
SPEAKER_01
And whether if different planets in the universe had life, would the capacity would increase or decrease?
3
SPEAKER_01
Does life operate at its energy maximum?
3
SPEAKER_01
And they think that it does, that it actually operates at an efficiency that is far more above and beyond any computational system.
3
SPEAKER_00
How is that possible to determine at all?
3
SPEAKER_01
That you tell me.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s why I dropped the citation.
3
SPEAKER_01
I found the citation.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s quite an interesting paper.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s a bit, you know, it s a, obviously we can only calculate and infer these things.
3
SPEAKER_00
But- It s a good question to ask.
3
SPEAKER_00
Is the life that we see here on Earth and life elsewhere in the universe, is it using the energy most efficiently?
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
It seems to be very efficient.
3
SPEAKER_00
Again, if we compare it to computers, it seems to be incredibly efficient at using energy.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I think they look at the theoretical optimum for electronic devices and then try to understand where life falls on this and life is certainly more efficient.
3
SPEAKER_00
And that s ultimately the physical side.
3
SPEAKER_00
How well are you using for this entire mechanism the energy available to you?
3
SPEAKER_00
And so given all the resilience to errors and all that kind of stuff, it seems that it s close to its maximum.
3
SPEAKER_00
And this paper aside, it does seem that life, obviously that s the constraint we have on Earth, right, is the amount of energy.
3
SPEAKER_00
So that s one way to define life.
3
SPEAKER_00
Well, the input is energy, and the output is what?
3
SPEAKER_00
I don t know.
3
SPEAKER_00
Self-replicating.
3
SPEAKER_00
Okay, let s go there.
3
SPEAKER_00
How do you personally define life?
3
SPEAKER_00
Do you have a favorite definition you try to sneak up on?
3
SPEAKER_00
Is it possible to define life on earth?
3
SPEAKER_01
I don t know.
3
SPEAKER_01
It depends on what you are defining it for.
3
SPEAKER_01
If you re defining it for finding different life forms, then it probably needs to have some quantification in it so that you can
3
SPEAKER_01
use it in whatever the mission that you re operating to be more like.
3
SPEAKER_00
LBW So you mean like it s not binary, it s like a seven out of 10?
3
SPEAKER_01
HH Life-like?
3
SPEAKER_01
I don t know.
3
SPEAKER_01
I don t think that defining is that essential.
3
SPEAKER_01
I think it s a good exercise, but I m not sure if we need to
3
SPEAKER_01
agree a universally defined way of understanding life, because the definition itself seems to be ever evolving anyway, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
We have the NASA s definition.
3
SPEAKER_01
It has its minuses and pluses, but it seems to be doing its job.
3
SPEAKER_00
But what are the different, if there is a line, and it s impossible or unproductive to define that line, nevertheless, we know it when we see it,
3
SPEAKER_00
is one definition that the Supreme Court likes.
3
SPEAKER_00
And that s kind of an important thing to think about when we look at life on other planets.
3
SPEAKER_00
So how do we try to identify if a thing is living when we go to Mars, when we go to
3
SPEAKER_00
the different moons in our solar system will go outside our solar system to look for life on other planets.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s unlikely to be a sort of a smoking gun event, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
It s not gonna be, hey, I found this.
3
SPEAKER_00
You don t think so?
3
SPEAKER_01
I don t think so, unless you find an elephant on some exoplanet, then I can say, yeah, there s life here.
3
SPEAKER_00
No, but isn t there a dynamic nature to the thing?
3
SPEAKER_00
Like it moves, it has a membrane that looks like there s stuff inside.
3
SPEAKER_01
It doesn t need to move, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, like look at plants.
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, they grow, but there are plants that can be also pretty dormant.
3
SPEAKER_01
And arguably, they do everything that is one of my...
3
SPEAKER_01
favorite professors once said that the plant does everything that a giraffe does without moving.
3
SPEAKER_01
So movement is not necessarily.
3
SPEAKER_00
But on a certain time scale, the plant does move, it just moves slower.
3
SPEAKER_00
It moves pretty quickly.
3
SPEAKER_01
I would say that it s hard to quantify this or even measure it, but life is definitely chemistry finding solutions, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
So it is chemistry exploring itself
3
SPEAKER_01
and maintaining this exploration for billions of years.
3
SPEAKER_00
So, okay, so a planet is a bunch of chemistry and then you run it and say, all right, figure out what cool stuff you can come up with.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s essentially what life is.
3
SPEAKER_00
Given a chemistry, what is the cool stuff I can come up with?
3
SPEAKER_01
If that chemistry or the solutions that it embarks upon are maintained in a form of memory.
3
SPEAKER_01
Right, so you don t just need to have the exploring chemical space, but you need to also maintain a memory of some of those solutions for over
3
SPEAKER_01
long periods of time.
3
SPEAKER_01
So the memory component makes it more living to me.
3
SPEAKER_01
Because chemistry can always sample, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
So chemistry is chemistry.
3
SPEAKER_01
But are you just constantly sampling or are you building on your former solutions and then maintaining a memory of those solutions over billions of years?
3
SPEAKER_01
Or at least that s what happened here.
3
SPEAKER_00
Chemistry can t build life if it s always living in the moment.
3
SPEAKER_00
The physicists will be very upset with you.
3
SPEAKER_00
Okay, so memory could be a fundamental requirement to life.
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, life is obviously chemistry and physics leading to...
3
SPEAKER_01
biology.
3
SPEAKER_01
So this is not a disciplinary problem of one discipline trampling other disciplines.
3
SPEAKER_01
But what you need to have is definitely, I mean, chemistry is everywhere, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
tend to think you can be a chemist, you can study chemistry, you can study physics, you can study geology, anywhere in the universe, but this is the only place you can study biology.
3
SPEAKER_01
This is the only place to be a biologist.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s it.
3
SPEAKER_01
So definitely something very fundamental happened here, and you cannot take biology out of the equation.
3
SPEAKER_01
If you want to understand how that vast chemistry space, how that general
3
SPEAKER_01
sequence space got narrowed down to what is available or what is used by life, you need to understand the rules of selection, and that s where evolution and biology comes into play.
3
SPEAKER_00
So the rules of natural selection operate to you on the level of biology?
3
SPEAKER_01
Rules, I don t know if there are any rules like that.
3
SPEAKER_01
It would be fascinating to find in terms of the biology s rules.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s a very interesting and it s a very fascinating area of study now.
3
SPEAKER_01
And probably we will hear more about that decades to come.
3
SPEAKER_01
But if you want to go from the broad to specific, you need to understand the rules of selection.
3
SPEAKER_01
And that is going to come from understanding biology, yes.
3
SPEAKER_00
Well, actually, let me ask you about selection.
3
SPEAKER_00
You have a paper on evolutionary stalling, where you describe that evolution is not good at multitasking, or like in populations that evolve quickly.
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean, it s a very specific thing, but there could be a generalizable fundamental thing to this, that evolution is not able to improve multiple modules simultaneously.
3
SPEAKER_00
I guess the question is, what part of the organism does evolution quote unquote focus on to improve?
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, that was the driving question.
3
SPEAKER_01
We meddled with the part where you shouldn t be messing up with translation.
3
SPEAKER_00
This is the- Should or should not?
3
SPEAKER_01
You shouldn t.
3
SPEAKER_01
As I said, there are many ways to break it and all life needs it.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s one of your favorite things to do is to break life to see what happens.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s, yeah, because that s how kids learn, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
So you have to break something and then see how it will, then you do it over and over again to see if it will fix itself in the same ways.
3
SPEAKER_01
So it s our, I don t know, it s the most fundamental properties of ourselves as human beings.
3
SPEAKER_01
So if we shouldn t break translation, then we should try to break it to see how it will repair.
3
SPEAKER_00
So which part did you break?
3
SPEAKER_01
I broke elongation.
3
SPEAKER_00
What s the role of elongation in this process?
3
SPEAKER_01
So we have four steps of the translations, initiate, elongate.
3
SPEAKER_01
So you elongate the chain of the information chain that you re now creating, the peptide chain, or let s say broadly polymer chain.
3
SPEAKER_01
And there s the termination step and there s the recycling.
3
SPEAKER_01
So all of these steps are carried out by proteins that are also named after these steps.
3
SPEAKER_01
Initiation is the initiation factor protein, elongation is the elongator protein.
3
SPEAKER_01
We broke elongation.
3
SPEAKER_01
So the starting codon could still arrive to where it s supposed to go, but the following information couldn t get carried out because we replaced elongation with its own ancestral version.
3
SPEAKER_01
So we inserted roughly a 700 million year old elongation factor protein after
3
SPEAKER_01
removing the modern gene.
3
SPEAKER_01
So we made this ancient-modern hybrid organism.
3
SPEAKER_00
And that essentially creates, in some way, the ancient version of that organism.
3
SPEAKER_01
I wouldn t say so.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s a hybrid organism.
3
SPEAKER_01
Because the rest of the cell, the rest of the genome is still modern.
3
SPEAKER_01
And that goes back to the difference between Jurassic Park.
3
SPEAKER_01
There are many differences, obviously, given that this is not fiction.
3
SPEAKER_01
We are doing it.
3
SPEAKER_01
But also, we are not necessarily… I think in Jurassic Park, they are taking
3
SPEAKER_01
They find an ancient organism and then put a modern gene inside the ancient organism.
3
SPEAKER_01
In our case, we are still working with what we got, but putting an ancestral DNA inside the modern organism.
3
SPEAKER_00
So you re like taking a new car and putting an old engine into it?
3
SPEAKER_01
In a way, yeah, yes.
3
SPEAKER_00
Seeing what happens.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yes, but in our case, it s more like a transformer than just a regular car.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s just doing things.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so it s a more complicated organism than just a car.
3
SPEAKER_00
I got it, so what does that teach you?
3
SPEAKER_01
We wanted to understand multiple things.
3
SPEAKER_01
One is how does the cell respond to perturbation?
3
SPEAKER_01
And we didn t just put the ancient DNA, we inserted, we sampled DNA from currently existing organisms, so the cousins of this microbe.
3
SPEAKER_01
and collected DNA sequences from the cousins as well.
3
SPEAKER_01
So both ancestor and the current cousin DNA, so to speak, and engineered all of these things to the modern bacteria and generated a collection of microbes that either have the ancient component or the variant elongator component that still alive today, but coming from a different part of the tree.
3
SPEAKER_00
So you broke elongation.
3
SPEAKER_00
Was that something you did as part of the paper on evolutionary stalling to try to figure out how evolution figures out what to try to improve?
3
SPEAKER_00
Did that help?
3
SPEAKER_01
Yes, because we were not supposed to mess with the translation, that s exactly what we did.
3
SPEAKER_01
And we altered elongation by changing it with different versions of elongation that are either coming from species that still are around today, you can imagine them as sitting on the tips of the tree, near branch, far branch, compared to the organism that we re working with, cousins, distant cousins.
3
SPEAKER_01
as well as the ancestors of the bacteria that we are now modifying.
3
SPEAKER_00
How much different variation is there in that elongation step?
3
SPEAKER_00
Like what are the different flavors of elongation?
3
SPEAKER_01
That s a very good question.
3
SPEAKER_01
So mechanistically or mechanically, it s the same.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s very conserved.
3
SPEAKER_01
So all life elongates the same way.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s nothing but a shuttle.
3
SPEAKER_01
You just carry a chemical with you, the bit, to the heart of the machine.
3
SPEAKER_00
Is it essentially doing like a copy-paste operation?
3
SPEAKER_01
It has its tail that s attached to the code, which is then carried biochemically to the linear chain, to the core of ribosome.
3
SPEAKER_01
And it sits on there, it s released and the peptides click, the codes rather click.
3
SPEAKER_01
Once that chemistry that s at the tail end occurs, the protein leaves the,
3
SPEAKER_01
So you can imagine it s like it hops in there and hops out.
3
SPEAKER_01
And when it hops and hops out, it leaves the information behind.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s all it does, is bring the information, get out of there.
3
SPEAKER_01
And it s all triggered by biophysics, biochemistry, because of the way the enzyme choose energy, in this case, GTP, how the phosphor leaves the center, that kicks, that gives the additional kick to the enzyme to leave the center.
3
SPEAKER_00
So which parts are different then?
3
SPEAKER_00
Where s the flavors of different flavors in your kitchen?
3
SPEAKER_01
Usually the parts that matter don t change over time.
4
SPEAKER_00
Nature conserves the sites of these proteins that are important for its job.
4
SPEAKER_00
If there s a difference, then we want to know, especially if there s a difference between two cousins.
4
SPEAKER_00
And we look at the sites that interact with the most important parts of this machinery.
4
SPEAKER_00
If we see any difference, we tend to mutate or we engineer that part, we alter that part because it gives us a clue that there must be something interesting going on here or not.
4
SPEAKER_01
Okay, so that s not the fundamental part of the machinery, but it s some flavorful characteristic that you can play with.
4
SPEAKER_00
So now you stripped the machinery down to its parts, and now you re looking at the parts of the parts.
4
SPEAKER_00
And it depends where you re looking and how you re looking and what you re looking at, but usually we see up to 70% level conserved identity across all modern versions.
4
SPEAKER_00
when you travel back in time, the identity decreases.
4
SPEAKER_00
So elongation likely existed.
4
SPEAKER_00
We have good reason to think that it existed at the dawn of life.
4
SPEAKER_00
So you re looking at a 3.8 billion year old mechanism.
4
SPEAKER_00
And when we look at the ancestors that we resurrect, we see about 40% identity.
4
SPEAKER_00
So the identity definitely decreases as you go back in time, but still 60% shared information over 4 billion year.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s pretty good.
4
SPEAKER_01
Is that just for elongation or for the entire translation?
4
SPEAKER_00
Depends on what you do.
4
SPEAKER_00
So, for initiation, we ve also recently published this.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s a different story.
4
SPEAKER_00
But overall, you see high level of identity that is kept intact, especially if the component is essential for life.
4
SPEAKER_01
Okay, so 40% and 60%, 70% you said, but like from generation to generation, how does evolution, and presumably that s what that paper is looking at, is the parts of the parts.
4
SPEAKER_01
How does it...
4
SPEAKER_01
able to say, like mess with the parts and try to come up with a cooler, improved version of the organism.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so let me describe to you what we did in that experiment.
4
SPEAKER_00
We took bacteria, we perturbed the elongation in all of these with different variants.
4
SPEAKER_00
So we had an initial set of, a group of bacteria that we had.
4
SPEAKER_00
We then subjected these bacteria to evolution in the lab.
4
SPEAKER_00
So we, first of all, we knew we broke it because upon engineering, we measured what s going on with the cell.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s not growing as well.
4
SPEAKER_00
They re not healthy.
4
SPEAKER_00
We can see it with our eyes.
4
SPEAKER_00
We can measure it.
4
SPEAKER_00
That if they were generating an offspring every 20 minutes, now it is 40 minutes, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
So we really messed them up.
4
SPEAKER_00
They don t want to work with this thing.
4
SPEAKER_00
They don t want each other, but they need each other.
4
SPEAKER_00
So we created that situation for them.
4
SPEAKER_00
which is good because we wanted to see how they will cooperate with each other to fix this problem, because we know that that s not the condition that they want to live in, especially when they know what they can do.
4
SPEAKER_00
So with that, we subjected these organisms to evolution in the lab.
4
SPEAKER_00
We refer to this as experimental evolution.
4
SPEAKER_00
We subject bacteria to different selection pressure, project them through bottlenecks.
4
SPEAKER_00
Every day we
4
SPEAKER_00
randomly collect a handful of bacteria from the flask, put them in a new fresh environment with fresh food, keep them in this environment for 24 hours until they reach a more dormant state, and then we introduce them to a new environment.
4
SPEAKER_00
So we repeated this for about, I will say, 150 days.
4
SPEAKER_00
So every day, nonstop, we repeated this experiment.
4
SPEAKER_01
How many different kinds of environments are there?
4
SPEAKER_00
We kept the environments to the same because we had different initial conditions.
4
SPEAKER_00
We kept the environment constant, same temperature, same food, same source of carbon, but we created replicates for each.
4
SPEAKER_00
So in some ways, we created our own fossil record in the lab by evolving and generating these flasks.
4
SPEAKER_00
And every step of the way, we also froze these cells and took stocks of them in the cryo-freezer.
4
SPEAKER_01
How long does it take to go from one generation to the next in bacteria?
4
SPEAKER_00
For E. coli, it s usually 20 minutes.
4
SPEAKER_01
Okay, great, so that s the experiment.
4
SPEAKER_01
That s the experiment.
4
SPEAKER_01
And you re always messing with it in the same way for the initial?
4
SPEAKER_00
It s the same way.
4
SPEAKER_00
So we introduced variation at the elongation level because we perturbed it with different elongations.
4
SPEAKER_00
We found that if we introduce a different protein that is very different, the cells don t like that, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
So if the distance is larger,
4
SPEAKER_00
consequences also large, meaning that you hit them harder if you introduce a variant that is really foreign to them, that s really distant.
4
SPEAKER_00
In our case, it was the ancestor.
4
SPEAKER_00
They really did not like the ancestor, but they were okay with their nearest cousin.
4
SPEAKER_01
Right.
4
SPEAKER_01
Okay, great.
4
SPEAKER_01
So you did vary in the distance.
4
SPEAKER_00
We varied the evolutionary distance, and then we kept the experimental conditions the same, and we propagated these populations every day for 150 days, and we collected bacteria every step of the way and looked at the sequence.
4
SPEAKER_00
We wanted to understand what sort of changes may have happened in the genome to respond to the variation that we ve introduced.
4
SPEAKER_01
So what kind of changes would you be seeing depending on the evolutionary distance of the thing you shoved into it?
4
SPEAKER_00
Exactly.
4
SPEAKER_00
So we knew where we punched, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
We punched right at the heart, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
We punched the translation.
4
SPEAKER_00
So we expected, is it going to be a translation?
4
SPEAKER_00
Are we going to see a change?
4
SPEAKER_00
Will translation respond to this by fixing itself right away?
4
SPEAKER_00
Or will it be another, outside of translation, something completely different, a different module?
4
SPEAKER_00
Because translation itself is a module.
4
SPEAKER_00
Or will it be within elongation, a really sub-protein level thing?
4
SPEAKER_00
So we had a strategy to identify the mutational pathways by categorizing what we expected to find or where.
4
SPEAKER_01
Okay, so why does it not do multitasking?
4
SPEAKER_01
Why is it not improving multiple things simultaneously?
4
SPEAKER_00
It turned out that what we observed in general is that first of all, the harder we hit the cells, the more likely they were to respond by changes right at where we hit it.
4
SPEAKER_00
When you say hit it, you mean like changing something about- I like to think of it as hitting because we are, I like to think of this as breaking the cell, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
I mean, not breaking enough to kill it, but we still, because they re still alive, they re not doing their job well.
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So the bigger the evolutionary distance of the thing you put in there, the harder the hit, is how you think about it?
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The bigger the hammer?
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SPEAKER_00
Bigger the hammer, exactly.
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You hit it with, okay.
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That s what it turned out to be, because that s what the data told us, that if the variation is higher, then the consequences will also be.
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higher in the sense that the cells will not grow as healthy compared to a variant that is coming from a near, or a variant that is coming from a near evolutionary distance.
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Is it wrong to think of this kind of hitting as akin to a mutation or no?
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What are we supposed to learn from this hitting?
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Like how the thing evolves after it s being hit in this way, what does that teach us?
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Because we see translation machinery as almost, it is so conserved and so essential, it is not even clear whether we can remove some of the parts or whether the entire translation will need all of the same parts in the same efficiency.
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We don t understand the rules of this machinery.
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So the first thing we understand is that what is the resilience?
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What are we really talking about here when we talk about you cannot mess with this translation?
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Is this true?
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Because it is so conserved and so similar and functions in the most conserved ways, that was the first thing that we wanted to understand.
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Did you learn anything interesting about the resilience at the chemical, physical, informatic, computational, biological?
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SPEAKER_00
No, I wouldn t say that.
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In the biological level, yes, because we found that the,
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different modules started responding to the changes that we ve introduced, and that we could never recover the translation as effectively as it used to be, so that it never reached to its optimality, that it was always suboptimal.
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It needed, say, one more mutation, perhaps, to get there.
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It accumulated four mutations.
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We did a lot of experiments to understand this, of course.
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It was accumulating mutations, it was getting better at its task,
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Maybe it needed a couple other mutations to get really good at it, but somehow those mutations never happened.
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And before those mutations happened, we saw another module emerging through mutations and getting better at its own different task that is not translation.
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You can think of cell as a web of networks, right?
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And we think of this as multiple, almost airports that are proteins that are more central hubs versus their proteins that maybe are not as important hub.
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If you introduce a problem in the most populated hub, you re going to mess up the traffic system more drastically.
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And that s what we were messing with in the biological terms as well.
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SPEAKER_01
So when we say module, like translation would be one of the modules.
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Translation would be one.
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SPEAKER_01
So you re basically saying when you mess with translation, the organism would choose to either try to fix that module or another module, depending.
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but it wouldn t do multiple modules.
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It wouldn t do multiple modules.
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It focused on one module at a time, and right before that module maybe reached to its own maximum, it stalled its optimality at a certain degree.
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So you never get to a degree that is more optimal than you can achieve, even though perhaps another mutation could get you there.
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SPEAKER_01
Since you messed with the translation, from a sort of optimal perspective, wouldn t it make sense for the cell to try to start fixing the translation?
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SPEAKER_00
Not, that s exactly what we thought and it didn t, it was not the case for all the broken translation missionaries.
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For instance, if the variant was coming from a near ancestor, that didn t happen.
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It was almost cruising around trying different modules and sort of living its best life still without, because there s no real urgency in the system to fix the most important problem.
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And there s also not a direction.
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you know, maybe to you, it s obvious that s the problem, but to the cell, maybe you re the problem.
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I m living, like you said, my best life.
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SPEAKER_01
Like, we don t, I mean, I guess that s the thing about evolution is we don t know what the right direction to- Yeah, it s almost like you can imagine that you have this messy closet and, you know- Go on.
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It happens to be an accurate representation of my life.
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SPEAKER_00
So you take a look at it and you see all the sweaters or jeans all over the place, and then you look at a drawer that has socks coming out of it, and you think that s the most important one, I m just going to fix that one.
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SPEAKER_00
And then you fix that one, and then you think you will get to the other one, but you don t because you just fixed the most important one, that is the whatever that was getting into your way.
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That s really what evolution is.
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It s quite lazy.
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It fixes the problem that seems to be the most immediate and it doesn t go beyond what it really needs to.
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SPEAKER_00
It seems like at least for our experimental setup, that was the case.
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Especially for rapidly evolving systems.
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SPEAKER_01
So like, or is the environment they re operating in pretty constrained?
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SPEAKER_01
Like, is there urgency?
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SPEAKER_00
I would say that we definitely constrain the environment.
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SPEAKER_00
It s definitely removed from their natural setup.
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SPEAKER_00
We are not evolving them in a gut.
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SPEAKER_00
It s a very homogeneous system, very controlled temperature, controlled food, controlled carbon.
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SPEAKER_01
So just looking at that, let me ask the romantic question.
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How did evolution create so much beautiful, complex variety on Earth?
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SPEAKER_01
Like from that, you re saying that we re talking about improving different modules, but if we step back and look at the entirety of the tree of the different organisms that created all throughout history,
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the stuff that s fun to you with the first few billion and the stuff that s fun to me when I watch on YouTube, which is like the lion versus gorilla fights and so on.
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SPEAKER_01
But the whole thing is fun.
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SPEAKER_01
So with all that beautiful variety from the predator and the prey, from the self-replicating bacteria and all that kind of stuff, how did it do it?
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SPEAKER_00
How is a very difficult question, especially when we don t understand the past with clarity at all.
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SPEAKER_00
I can tell you that there seems to be very critical innovations that happened throughout the history of life that are each themselves very sophisticated singularities that emerged once and then they set the tone.
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One of which is emergence of translation.
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It s
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seems like it happened once, it had to happen once, seems like that s all it took.
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3.8 billion years, maybe older, clearly subjected to a lot of chemical evolution even prior to the last universal common ancestor.
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And then you jump and you see emergence of
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cyanobacteria that undeniably changed the course of those planets in the subsequent aerobic photosynthesis that life learned how to utilize what s available in the environment in the most profound way.
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And then you move forward, you see the emergence of eukaryotes, endosymbiosis, also another singular event.
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And then you move forward and then comes the plants.
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SPEAKER_00
So these are, I counted I think six different things that seems to have happened just once.
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SPEAKER_01
And- The singularity events in the history of evolution of life on Earth.
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SPEAKER_00
So what s really fascinating here is that there seems to be two different courses, the time course.
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SPEAKER_00
Evolution is operating at the molecular level, right?
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SPEAKER_00
We re talking about seconds.
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SPEAKER_00
We re talking about mutations that happen every second.
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SPEAKER_00
We re talking about selection that s also happening under a minute, right?
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SPEAKER_00
So that is a very fast process.
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SPEAKER_00
The fact that I can evolve bacteria in a lab and I say almost complainingly, oh my goodness, it took me 150 days.
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SPEAKER_00
I mean, that s pretty rapid for a change to be seen.
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SPEAKER_00
But then the big changes, and the ones that I m talking, the really big innovations that caused an increase of oxygen on this planet, or even its own mere presence, are due to these molecular innovations.
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SPEAKER_00
Seems to only happen a handful of times over billions of years of timescale.
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SPEAKER_01
Let me ask you this question, having to do with my half-asleep tweet.
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SPEAKER_01
So saying that we all originated from one common ancestor,
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That s just one of the miraculous things about life on Earth.
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Of course, you could say there s multiple common ancestors in the beginning, multiple organisms and so on, but the other stuff that you re talking about is these singular events, these leaps of invention throughout evolutionary history.
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SPEAKER_01
Now, there s a bunch of people who were commenting, a bit surprising to me, who were basically skeptical of this idea.
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SPEAKER_01
Well, I would say evolution, honestly.
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The process of evolution.
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But when you just actually focus in on like, holy crap.
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Eukaryotes were invented.
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Holy crap, photosynthesis was invented.
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Those are incredible inventions.
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And also, we can even go to Homo sapiens, intelligence.
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Where did that come from?
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There s these mysteries.
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I think where that skeptical comments were coming from were also just the general skepticism of science.
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I think from the pandemic, people, maybe a failure of institutions and so on,
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SPEAKER_01
there s been a growing distrust of science.
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SPEAKER_01
And it s not so much that it s anti-evolution, it s more of a stepping back and saying, wait a minute, maybe scientists don t have it all figured out.
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SPEAKER_01
And I think to Steel Man, that case is almost a step back and to realize there s so much mystery to each of these leaps.
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SPEAKER_01
So it makes you wonder, is there something that in 100-200 years we ll figure out that we totally don t understand yet?
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SPEAKER_01
I talked to a bunch of people about another mystery
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which is consciousness, right?
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And there s people called panpsychics who believe consciousness is one of the fundamental laws of the universe.
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So there could be...
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is like we have laws of physics that could be something that s like a consciousness field or something that permeates all matter.
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And so like there might be, it s kind of like Newtonian physics versus general relativity.
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SPEAKER_01
Like we have a good understanding of how things happen, but we need another layer of understanding to fill in the gaps of the mysteries of it all.
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And
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that sort of is a sobering reality that maybe there is something we really deeply don t understand.
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Do you have a sense of where the biggest mysteries here are?
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SPEAKER_01
Is it at the origin of life itself?
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Is it the leaps that we re talking about?
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SPEAKER_01
So you see the beauty, you re fascinated about the translation mechanism.
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What are the deep mysteries there to you?
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SPEAKER_00
We are nothing but chemical systems capable of formulating or answering questions about our own existence.
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SPEAKER_01
We humans or all of life, you think?
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SPEAKER_00
Humans, humans are, I mean, the fact that we can even have this conversation about our place in the universe is, at least to our knowledge, is quite specific to our own chemical species.
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SPEAKER_01
It s kind of wild.
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We re introspecting on our evolutionary history, and we re just a couple of organisms.
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SPEAKER_01
We re like another organism listening to this, and like, they re mind blown.
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SPEAKER_01
There s like three organisms, two of them talking, and the third one s like, holy shit.
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SPEAKER_00
I think that what I really find interesting about understanding the origin of life, or even contemplating about our own place in the universe, if at the end of this would come down to appreciating, or even before appreciating, really truly comprehending what it is that we got here.
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that to me is a huge gain.
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Because there s no single question in biology, I think, that will deliver that magnitude of that message and understanding, but understanding how life here started at first place, if we truly comprehend that.
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SPEAKER_00
This is not a concept that is well thought in schools.
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SPEAKER_00
We ask students to memorize these concepts.
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SPEAKER_00
If they are lucky, they learned RNA world,
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SPEAKER_00
chicken and egg problem, et cetera.
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SPEAKER_00
That s the extent to which that got, maybe their biology teacher was personally interested in the subject matter, if they re lucky.
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SPEAKER_00
You know the saying that the brains are evenly distributed across any metric you can imagine, but opportunities are not.
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SPEAKER_00
So if people aren t understanding the importance of this is because that s a lack of opportunity right there that was skipped through the proper education and training, then the delivery of why science matters or how science actually works.
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah, but how do you even begin to seriously think about the origin of life?
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SPEAKER_01
I mean, every problem
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SPEAKER_01
of existence, of life, has its time.
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So I don t know if it s time to understand consciousness yet.
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We might be 100 years away from that.
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SPEAKER_01
The origin of life, I don t know if it s time for us to understand that yet.
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SPEAKER_01
Maybe we need to solve so many more problems along the way.
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SPEAKER_00
It s not a competition of problems, right?
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SPEAKER_00
So there are all kinds of problems, and it takes a lot of people to make the world.
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SPEAKER_00
So you will always have some interesting brain going after an interesting problem to their own.
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SPEAKER_00
The issue here is that we need to, first of all, understand that what we have going on on this planet is pretty good.
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SPEAKER_00
Good planets are hard to find.
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SPEAKER_00
If we are alone in the universe, that s huge.
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SPEAKER_00
We need to take care of what we got here, and we are incredibly vulnerable to the changes that our own species also helped create.
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at the biosphere, at the ecosystem level.
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We take it for granted, we take what we created for granted because of the fact that we think we are some sort of ultimate end point, the most sophisticated, amazing thing that nature could generate.
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I think understanding, not even understanding, but asking these questions of where did this even come from?
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How did this even begin?
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And
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attempting to understand that using chemistry and physics and biology, and because we can, that s the ultimate gift we can give back to the entire species on this planet.
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I mean it s humbling.
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SPEAKER_01
It s humbling to realize the complexity of this whole mechanism.
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SPEAKER_01
It certainly puts humans in their proper perspective that we re not, just because we have brains and brains are intelligent doesn t mean we re the most intelligent thing because ultimately the whole mechanism of nature seems to be orders of magnitude more intelligent.
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SPEAKER_01
all of it, like we re a bunch, we re like a hierarchy of organisms that have a history of several billion years, and that all somehow came together to make a human.
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SPEAKER_01
And there ll be life after us, just as it was life before us.
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And something that comes after will be perhaps even more fascinating.
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SPEAKER_00
I think when you understand the magnitude of what happened here, there is no room for arrogance.
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SPEAKER_00
It should overwhelm you and humiliate.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s pretty humiliating.
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SPEAKER_00
It s quite amazing what happened here.
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SPEAKER_00
And there is no other discipline that will
5
SPEAKER_00
deliver that, but exploring our own origins and looking at life as a more planetary system phenomena rather than one single species at a time, a collective look.
5
SPEAKER_01
You mentioned this question in your TED Talk is
5
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the two possibilities of the universe being full of life and the universe being empty and we re the only life in the universe.
5
SPEAKER_01
How do you feel about both options?
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SPEAKER_01
Just actually you as a single chemical organism introspecting about its existence in this world.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s having a planet full of life is interesting because there are, we talked about
5
SPEAKER_00
life being all about chemistry, exploring solutions.
5
SPEAKER_00
And having solutions in front of you is great, it s beneficial, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
Solutions being different organisms, like other humans, you see them as the solutions to a chemistry problem.
5
SPEAKER_00
Different, different, yeah.
5
SPEAKER_01
Oh, that s an interesting solution.
5
SPEAKER_01
That s not, next time, we re in Austin, so there s a bunch of weirdos.
5
SPEAKER_01
Every time I see a weirdo, I ll be like, oh, that s an interesting solution to this chemistry problem.
5
SPEAKER_00
So now you think like an origin of life science.
5
SPEAKER_01
But it s funny that that one worked out.
5
SPEAKER_01
Let s see where else it goes.
5
SPEAKER_00
But having this emptiness and unpredictability of uncovering a novel solution can also have its own benefits.
5
SPEAKER_00
And we should be open to what other solutions might be out there and exploring those solutions.
5
SPEAKER_01
Or to different chemistry problems.
5
SPEAKER_01
So that s where you see the other planets out there as different chemistry problems.
5
SPEAKER_00
To their own local environment, yes.
5
SPEAKER_01
So how many chemistry problems
5
SPEAKER_01
have solutions that are lifelike to you out there in the universe?
5
SPEAKER_00
It s a wide open palette if you think about it.
5
SPEAKER_00
I don t quite know.
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SPEAKER_00
We know the chemistry is chemistry.
5
SPEAKER_00
I don t think the chemistry will be different elsewhere.
5
SPEAKER_00
But again, what is selected by chemistry will be determined by the environment most likely.
5
SPEAKER_01
See, I think there is life everywhere out there.
5
SPEAKER_01
So there s a guy named Nick Lane,
5
SPEAKER_01
whose gut, and it s interesting to me, I wonder what you think about it, his gut is, there s life everywhere out there, but it stops at the bacteria stage.
5
SPEAKER_01
So he says the eukaryotes is the biggest invention and the hardest one.
5
SPEAKER_00
I wonder if he thinks that s an accidental outcome.
5
SPEAKER_00
If he thinks that s inevitable, I wonder what that means.
5
SPEAKER_00
But it s a likely possibility that the bacterial or microbial life is definitely more attainable.
5
SPEAKER_01
So that s a weird world where our entire galaxy just has bacteria everywhere.
5
SPEAKER_00
So you know, if you don t like microbes, you re on the wrong planet.
5
SPEAKER_01
No, I know, yeah, and viruses.
5
SPEAKER_01
I don t know which one there s more of, but they re both, and most of them are productive.
5
SPEAKER_00
They re fascinating.
5
SPEAKER_00
They do everything for us.
5
SPEAKER_01
You don t like microbes, you re on the wrong planet.
5
SPEAKER_01
Ah, you re full of good lines.
5
SPEAKER_01
Okay, right, right.
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SPEAKER_01
I just can t, there s an imperative to the whole thing.
5
SPEAKER_01
To me, the origin
5
SPEAKER_01
is the hard question, but once it gets going, I just don t see there s a- It seems like it s constantly creating more intelligent things, more fascinating, complex things they re able to solve complicated problems.
5
SPEAKER_00
That s a very interesting, like that s, I definitely agree that the initial steps may be the ultimate determinants, that once it s, you cannot stop it once it starts, it s possible.
5
SPEAKER_01
I just have never unearthed, but maybe, I just, whenever I see life, it seems to flourish everywhere.
5
SPEAKER_01
The thing is, I don t, the only thing I haven t seen is the start of it.
5
SPEAKER_00
Exactly, but, and how are we gonna understand that if we don t know the origin of life science?
5
SPEAKER_00
I mean, that s the, and the question here isn t exactly our ability to recapitulate everything that happened in the exact way that it happened, right?
5
SPEAKER_00
This is about what can happen rather than, or maybe how it can happen.
5
SPEAKER_01
You think it s possible to study the origin of language using English?
5
SPEAKER_01
So,
5
SPEAKER_01
Like there s a very particular chemistry here.
5
SPEAKER_01
There s a particular set of assumptions, understanding about what life is, what everything is.
5
SPEAKER_01
Our perception of reality is very specifically constructed through the evolutionary process.
5
SPEAKER_01
I wonder if it s possible to...
5
SPEAKER_01
get to some first principles, deep understanding of how life originates in such a way that you can actually construct it on other planets.
5
SPEAKER_01
Ultimately, it feels like if you re doing it in a lab on Earth, you re always going to be using some aspect of the life that s already here.
5
SPEAKER_00
So that s what I sort of talked about in my talk as well.
5
SPEAKER_01
Everyone should go.
5
SPEAKER_01
Watch the TED Talks, very good.
5
SPEAKER_01
The annoying thing to me about TED Talks, I guess it s by design, is they re too short.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s like, come on.
5
SPEAKER_00
And did you know that there s no prompter involved?
5
SPEAKER_01
There s no, wait, there is?
5
SPEAKER_01
Or there isn t?
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, you have to memorize stuff.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
5
SPEAKER_00
It must be a grueling process.
5
SPEAKER_00
And thanks to my amazing editor who probably is watching this too, David Bielo, it was very, very helpful.
5
SPEAKER_00
But I would say that.
5
SPEAKER_01
Very professional organization.
5
SPEAKER_01
I like this podcast.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s a very professional organization.
5
SPEAKER_01
I respect that medium.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, anyway, in the TED Talk about, yeah, life, life creating life.
5
SPEAKER_00
So it s a likely scenario that once we understand how life as a chemical system is capable of formulating its own expression and generating a memory and manages its existence on a planetary body for billions of years, once we understand what conditions gave rise to that,
5
SPEAKER_00
we may be very likely to understand whether a different planet also be likely to instigate its own chemical revolution if it was provided through some missing ingredients.
5
SPEAKER_00
You can think of it as sending fertilizer to a different planet that is missing its own chemical composition or lacking or that it needs more of what it has.
5
SPEAKER_00
The difference between making that planet Earth-like, which this is not what that s about.
5
SPEAKER_00
We re not talking about terraforming or we re not talking about turning that planet into Earth-like system.
5
SPEAKER_00
We are talking about first understanding that planet.
5
SPEAKER_00
studying its chemistry, studying its properties well enough to understand whether it is close to its own chemical revolution, and maybe giving it that extra nudge.
5
SPEAKER_00
So this is obviously a pretty big speculation and suggestion.
5
SPEAKER_00
And it s a very interesting proposition because this is a yes or no question, right?
5
SPEAKER_00
This is the ultimate would you rather.
5
SPEAKER_00
And I think it says a lot about the perception of the person who s answering this question.
5
SPEAKER_00
That if the answer is, no, no, no, absolutely not, that s not something we wanna do, I wanna know why that is the case.
5
SPEAKER_01
So just to be clear, what we re talking about is looking at the chemical cocktail of a particular planet,
5
SPEAKER_01
and having, like, tasting it and seeing what s missing.
5
SPEAKER_01
So having a very systematic, rigorous, scientific process for understanding what is missing.
5
SPEAKER_01
Not what is missing in terms of to make it Earth-like, but what is missing in order to be sufficiently, have the spark, or the capacity to have the spark to launch the experiment.
5
SPEAKER_01
evolution, revolution, the evolutionary process.
5
SPEAKER_01
And then the question is, do we want to then...
5
SPEAKER_01
complete the cocktail.
5
SPEAKER_00
The proposition is to also make us think that we will likely have this capacity at some point, especially when we understand origin of life better and better, right?
5
SPEAKER_00
So we will be asking ourselves this question.
5
SPEAKER_00
I guess I wanted to bring this to daylight a little bit because maybe in 10, 20 years, maybe more.
5
SPEAKER_01
So you wanted to ask the ethical question, should we
5
SPEAKER_01
of basically start life elsewhere on another planet.
5
SPEAKER_00
Or enable the chemical capacity of that planet that it may one day itself get there.
5
SPEAKER_01
Okay, so for me, the answer is yes.
5
SPEAKER_01
So if you were to try to argue against my yes, what would you say?
5
SPEAKER_01
Why not?
5
SPEAKER_01
What s the worst that can happen if we seed another planet with life?
5
SPEAKER_01
What are the things we should think about?
5
SPEAKER_01
Is your main concern a chemical biological one or is it an ethical one?
5
SPEAKER_01
What do you think about?
5
SPEAKER_00
Well, the worst thing that can happen is that it wouldn t work, right?
5
SPEAKER_00
So that it s not a,
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SPEAKER_00
it s not likely that an attempt like this would work.
5
SPEAKER_00
That s probably, because how do you, you gotta be very, you know, you have to have an understanding that I don t think we have just yet.
5
SPEAKER_01
I see, because if it doesn t work, then we could try again, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
To me, the worst case, the thing I would be worried about is we create life.
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SPEAKER_01
I mean, the same stuff I worry about, like with plants, is things that might have a conscious experience.
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SPEAKER_01
And then the dark aspect of life is life is increasingly a complex life.
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SPEAKER_01
Maybe I m anthropomorphizing, but it seems to have the capacity to suffer.
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And so we re creating something.
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SPEAKER_01
It s like when you have children, you put creatures into this world that will suffer, can suffer, and may suffer, depending on how you view life, may likely suffer.
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SPEAKER_01
And so now you carry this responsibility for doing your best to alleviate any suffering they might go through.
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SPEAKER_01
And that,
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SPEAKER_00
Perhaps it s romanticizing this notion of life.
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SPEAKER_00
Perhaps bacteria are not capable of suffering.
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SPEAKER_00
But perhaps it ll create more complex life forms that would be able to suffer.
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SPEAKER_00
And that feels like a responsibility as well.
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SPEAKER_00
Of course, other people would be concerned.
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SPEAKER_00
The more obvious concern is like,
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SPEAKER_00
Well, you just created a life form.
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SPEAKER_00
How do you know it s not gonna be a super deadly virus that somehow is able to hurt humans?
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, my concern is more, I feel like that s a solvable problem.
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SPEAKER_00
The problem of creating conscious beings that are able to suffer, that s a tricky one.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I can see why, because it goes back to, again, would we, first of all, do we have a responsibility to propagate more of this chemistry that we have on this planet elsewhere, given that we know ultimately we will be vanished by the entire planet?
6
SPEAKER_01
And if this is in fact a very rare chemical event that happens because all the right circumstances came together and we were the lucky one, do we have a responsibility to sponsor it?
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SPEAKER_01
If we were to back up- Sponsor, I like it.
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SPEAKER_00
That s a good way to put it.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
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SPEAKER_01
back up remnants of our civilization, right?
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SPEAKER_01
So we ve got to potentially create conditions on the different planets so that humans can survive given that we know or we want to just for the sake of growing.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, propagating, becoming multi-planetary species.
6
SPEAKER_01
Exactly, but what really is at stake here, I think, is actually, or what is really more interesting is what we don t see, which is, again, that chemical behavior that enabled everything in the first place.
6
SPEAKER_01
That s different than sending potato crops or engineering bacteria to live on a different planet.
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SPEAKER_01
That s very different.
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SPEAKER_01
you re really stripping it down to what is possible at the chemical level.
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SPEAKER_01
So even if you are instigating the chemistry on different planets, you are letting that very planet to do its thing.
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SPEAKER_01
You re not necessarily contaminating this planet with different chemistry because the idea behind this
6
SPEAKER_01
at least the way I thought about, is that you understand that planet, you understand the conditions, you understand the chemistry of the planet really well before choosing the planet as a candidate in the first place.
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SPEAKER_01
And then it s not about sending a missing ingredient per se, but again, just sending more of what it already has.
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SPEAKER_01
that will be respecting that planet s condition too.
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SPEAKER_01
So I m not suggesting any occupation.
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SPEAKER_01
I m not suggesting any colonization.
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SPEAKER_01
I m not suggesting any, like, let s just strip everything and make everything Earth-like.
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SPEAKER_01
That s not what I m saying.
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SPEAKER_01
It s more about empowering that place.
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SPEAKER_01
What you are saying is likely to be the motivator behind all this that s not, because I see suffering, I see pain.
6
SPEAKER_01
It s very interesting.
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SPEAKER_01
I think this is a question that really reveals a lot about the person who s answering it.
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SPEAKER_00
Well, okay, so the pushback on my pushback.
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SPEAKER_00
If I saw him deeply troubled by suffering, then I should be probably paralyzed about the history of life on Earth.
6
SPEAKER_00
And you know, there s... Can you elaborate?
6
SPEAKER_01
What do you mean?
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SPEAKER_00
Most of life who s ever lived suffered in ways that are almost unimaginable to me.
6
SPEAKER_01
You mean like our own species?
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SPEAKER_00
Our own species and before.
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SPEAKER_00
And animals living today.
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SPEAKER_00
And we re not even talking about factory farms.
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SPEAKER_00
We re just animals living in extreme poverty in the jungle.
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SPEAKER_00
You don t, people think like in the natural environment, animals live in a happy place.
6
SPEAKER_00
No, it s a brutal place of desperately trying to survive, of desperately trying to look for food.
6
SPEAKER_00
And it s just like all of that life, that s just mammals.
6
SPEAKER_00
And we understand mammals, but like throughout like trillions of organisms that led up to those mammals and the organisms living everywhere, like even bacteria, there s death everywhere.
6
SPEAKER_00
So maybe this idea of death, this idea of suffering,
6
SPEAKER_00
is actually, this thing that we see as a bug, is actually a feature.
6
SPEAKER_01
I don t think suffering is a linear property like that with life.
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SPEAKER_01
And I may be with Nick Lane on this one, that the likeliness of anything similar to what we got here, evolving in another planetary body, I think is quite low.
6
SPEAKER_00
Where would you say is the biggest unlikely thing?
6
SPEAKER_00
Do you mean humans or do you mean even multicellular organisms?
6
SPEAKER_01
Probably multicellular, but I understand both sides of the equation, right?
6
SPEAKER_01
In one level I can see that we may not have any other choice but to back up this chemistry somewhere else.
6
SPEAKER_01
So you would be saving, it s the ultimate saving, or our own record.
6
SPEAKER_01
It s not about, you know, yes, let s also save Beatles and all the amazing songs, but this would be the ultimate repository of life.
6
SPEAKER_01
But I can also see your point of view, for sure.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s really interesting, so don t seed a plant with a missing ingredient.
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SPEAKER_00
Try to understand what the ingredients it has.
6
SPEAKER_00
Is it possible to construct life?
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SPEAKER_00
For me, from a computer person, it just feels like something that could be solved computationally.
6
SPEAKER_01
we can learn from the mistakes that we ve done here and aspire not to repeat them.
6
SPEAKER_01
It is possible.
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SPEAKER_01
We do amazing things as humans.
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SPEAKER_01
There s a lot of suffering, but there s also a lot of beauty.
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SPEAKER_01
And we could choose what we want to be or what we want to
6
SPEAKER_01
see, right?
6
SPEAKER_01
So these attempts need not to come from a place of fear, but it can ultimately come from a peace of hope and love.
6
SPEAKER_00
I think we re just very recently figuring out stuff, like we ve, even just a century ago, we re doing atrocities that weren t seen as atrocities at the time.
6
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I think we re learning very quickly of what is right and wrong.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yes, and I work with a lot of, maybe because I m at the university, I get to teach young people every day.
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SPEAKER_01
Even at the time of four year or three few years, you see,
6
SPEAKER_01
generational difference already unfolding in front of you.
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SPEAKER_01
And maybe that s why I see hope because I think what we
6
SPEAKER_01
get to interact with in classrooms.
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SPEAKER_01
Every year, it s just getting better.
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SPEAKER_01
They are aware of issues in a way that I sure wasn t at their age.
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SPEAKER_01
Some levels I was, but in many levels I didn t think about.
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SPEAKER_01
I wasn t concerned of the problems.
6
SPEAKER_01
Well, they maybe have to be concerned because it s hitting the reality, it s hitting them hard.
6
SPEAKER_01
Younger people are not afraid of these things.
6
SPEAKER_01
An 18-year-old can face these brutal facts about the planet in ways that I don t think any other generation before them did.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it s super cool.
6
SPEAKER_00
you know, there s all these cool technologies that aid in the process of a human being being able to see the truth at deeper, deeper levels, like, you know, Wikipedia and just the internet in general is enabling education at a level that was unimaginable before the internet.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yes, and I think space exploration,
6
SPEAKER_01
even contemplating about these possibilities ultimately, and I will emphasize this again, should make us think about our own place in the universe.
6
SPEAKER_01
If we are alone, that is quite fascinating, and we definitely have a responsibility to guard what we got better and protect it better and don t take it for granted.
6
SPEAKER_01
If we are not the only one, that s also a lot of responsibility to understand
6
SPEAKER_01
what else is out there.
6
SPEAKER_01
So either proposition, as famously being told, is fascinating.
6
SPEAKER_01
But as a scientist, I think
6
SPEAKER_01
And I think that s a general behavior.
6
SPEAKER_01
Maybe not, my fellow scientists listening to this can correct me if they aren t like this, but you need to have a level of optimism and hope.
6
SPEAKER_01
That s something, you know, that things are worth working for, worth dreaming, worth imagining.
6
SPEAKER_01
And we cannot just have fear of suffering or fear of pain stopping us from doing marvelous things.
6
SPEAKER_00
I ve talked to quite a few people in my life who ve gotten a lot of shit done, have helped a lot of people, and I don t know a single one of them who s not an optimist.
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SPEAKER_00
Now, there s a place for critics and cynicism in this world, but in terms of actually building things and creating things in this world that help a lot of people, I think optimism is a requirement, is a precondition in almost all cases in my limited, humble human experience.
6
SPEAKER_00
But I tend to, when I look out there, think that aliens are everywhere.
6
SPEAKER_00
I think there s,
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SPEAKER_00
To me, I have a humility about, I tend to see us humans as being very limited cognitively.
6
SPEAKER_00
Like there s so many things we don t understand.
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SPEAKER_00
I think eventually we ll understand, of course we don t know this, but my gut says we ll understand that alien signals and life has been all around us and we re too dumb to see it.
6
SPEAKER_00
Like whatever life is, whatever the life force is, whatever consciousness is, whatever intelligence, whatever the mechanism that led to the origin of life on Earth was everywhere.
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SPEAKER_00
We re just too dumb to see it.
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SPEAKER_00
It s in the physics.
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SPEAKER_00
It s somewhere, we ll find it somewhere in the physics.
6
SPEAKER_01
I think that s one of the most humbling parts of also being a scientist, that we know that we never know for sure.
6
SPEAKER_01
And for the outsiders, perhaps, that may be a very strange way of living, especially when your pursuit is about creating knowledge.
6
SPEAKER_01
and that you ll know that what you created can also be, and hopefully will be disproven so that another level will rise.
6
SPEAKER_01
And I think we ve seen that this lack of maybe connection between the approach to science or knowledge versus folks who are maybe not thinking about these problems every day, that we are okay with being wrong.
6
SPEAKER_01
In fact, we know that that s the only way to push the limits of knowledge.
6
SPEAKER_00
How do you think life originated on Earth?
6
SPEAKER_00
We ve talked about this a bit.
6
SPEAKER_00
Do you have a gut feeling about, first of all, actually even to step back, do you think, because you were like flirting with this idea, did the translation mechanism came before life?
6
SPEAKER_01
I think that you cannot separate from emergence of translation machinery from emergence of life or something like translation machinery, this whole informatic chemical computing system that is also capable of dynamism and evolvability that comes with biology, biological behavior from emergence of life itself.
6
SPEAKER_01
We ve definitely took a lot of steps towards understanding origins.
6
SPEAKER_01
are able to create molecules from right environments, lightning, heat, and you make amino acids.
6
SPEAKER_01
So we are able to create the building blocks, the Miller-Urey experiment.
6
SPEAKER_01
That s now like 60 years ago.
6
SPEAKER_01
We are able to create the building blocks.
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SPEAKER_01
We are able to make them interact with one another.
6
SPEAKER_01
They can get more complex.
6
SPEAKER_01
Some cold is messy.
6
SPEAKER_01
There s all this chemistry that s going on.
6
SPEAKER_01
We are able to
6
SPEAKER_01
have these chemicals interact with one another, maybe have even some emergent properties that we can quantify.
6
SPEAKER_01
definitely there is this trend towards more systems-level approach to origins, with more introduction of systems-level chemistry, more network-level chemistry, and complex system integration, in order to understand how, now that we can make these building blocks, we can make them interact with one another, but how do we make them interact with one another in more intelligent ways that will
6
SPEAKER_01
have the properties of a biological system, will be heritable, it will be responding to the environment, it will mutate, and it will sustain itself.
6
SPEAKER_01
That is the final bit, I think, in our Origin of Life adventure.
6
SPEAKER_01
And we are extremely close.
6
SPEAKER_01
I m very optimistic that our community will get a handle of this problem in this decade.
6
SPEAKER_01
This is, in fact, I think one of the most exciting times to be doing this work.
6
SPEAKER_00
What would be super convincing to you, like incredibly amazing, would blow your mind if X was done in a lab?
6
SPEAKER_00
I don t know if you would call it origin of life, but something really truly remarkable and special done in a lab.
6
SPEAKER_00
What would that look like to you?
6
SPEAKER_01
The properties that I listed, those five properties that I listed about the machinery that is capable of sensing and responding the environment, if we can, I would imagine it s similar to Miller-Urey experiments where they
6
SPEAKER_01
only sparked particular environmental forces and were able to produce a chemical that is important for life, or a mix of chemicals important for life, or building blocks rather.
6
SPEAKER_01
If I saw that a similar experiment where a well-defined geochemical parameter was
6
SPEAKER_01
subjected on a mix of chemistry, which led that chemistry to form some level of computation, informatic, biological property.
6
SPEAKER_01
And by biological, I m gonna keep it to very minimum, as I defined early on.
6
SPEAKER_01
That would be super exciting to me, a self-organizing chemistry that we can create experimentally in a flask by simulating
6
SPEAKER_01
the conditions of early Earth, be it radiation, be it temperature, or mix of both, that would be very cool.
6
SPEAKER_00
And doing all the five, the chemical, physical, informatic, computational, biological.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
6
SPEAKER_00
So like simulation and a computer would not be good enough?
6
SPEAKER_01
It would be great because they help to understand the parameters, maybe formulate, maybe quantify, create models, but ultimately you need to experiment.
6
SPEAKER_00
unless it s quantum mechanical simulation, but that s going to be extremely difficult.
6
SPEAKER_00
So simulating from the physics up, that s going to be very, because you re gonna have to simulate the physical, the chemical, the informatic.
6
SPEAKER_00
I mean, honestly, it s very difficult to start the quantum mechanics and end up in biology, all through simulation.
6
SPEAKER_00
But the stuff that DeepMind did with alpha fold and protein folding is really inspiring.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s inspiring in that,
6
SPEAKER_00
you re able to do to solve a difficult biology problem.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, absolutely.
6
SPEAKER_01
That s why there s definitely a lot of benefits to those models, predictions, because they at least help the experimentalist to come up with the priors and parameterize things better, maybe eliminates very obvious dead ends early on, given that experiments take such a long time and it s a huge investment.
6
SPEAKER_01
And no one s a better experimentalist than nature.
6
SPEAKER_00
Let me ask you, perhaps, a depressing, sad for you question.
6
SPEAKER_01
You really want to make me sad.
6
SPEAKER_01
You re not gonna win.
6
SPEAKER_00
No, I know.
6
SPEAKER_00
There s a flame of optimism in you that will never be extinguished.
6
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
6
SPEAKER_00
The idea of past permeate.
6
SPEAKER_00
You mentioned, would we seed another planet with life?
6
SPEAKER_00
Is it possible that our planet was seeded with life from elsewhere?
6
SPEAKER_01
So what the proposition I made
7
SPEAKER_00
I like to think of it as proto-Spermia rather than pan-Spermia because it s even more proto-state than acknowledging.
7
SPEAKER_00
Because in pan-Spermia, you still have a cell, right?
7
SPEAKER_00
You still have something that is very, even a cell to me would be very Earth-like, right?
7
SPEAKER_00
I m talking at sub-stellar level in the proposition of
7
SPEAKER_00
spreading chemistry.
7
SPEAKER_01
So spreading chemical ingredients, not spreading life.
7
SPEAKER_00
Exactly.
7
SPEAKER_00
It would be more like the fertilizer that is well-adopted and compatible with that planetary body.
7
SPEAKER_00
In panspermia, you re still imagining either an entire bacteria or microbe or a cell or something that is DNA, which is still Terran.
7
SPEAKER_01
So in that sense, that would
7
SPEAKER_01
That doesn t matter to you, because it s chemistry.
7
SPEAKER_01
That s the initial conditions.
7
SPEAKER_01
It doesn t matter how the initial conditions came to be.
7
SPEAKER_01
They are what they are, and let s go from there.
7
SPEAKER_01
And there s all kinds of fascinatingly different initial conditions in terms of chemistry on different planets.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yes, but in terms of panspermia, I mean, obviously, there s gonna be always room for those sort of discussions, or there will be...
7
SPEAKER_00
those discussions will always be present, I think, in any life in universe debates.
7
SPEAKER_00
But the problem I have with Panspermia is that it removes the problem from the planet to somewhere else.
7
SPEAKER_00
It makes it
7
SPEAKER_00
very difficult to answer scientifically, right?
7
SPEAKER_00
You just took the problem away from this planet and formulate it in a way that I cannot go and try to understand in the lab doing experiments or even through models.
7
SPEAKER_01
Does it though, so I ve heard brilliant biologists like yourself say that, but I just, to me, okay, here s how I think of Earth.
7
SPEAKER_01
So I actually am able to hold all these possibilities in my head and all of them are inspiring to me.
7
SPEAKER_01
I kind of think there s a possibility that Earth is just an experiment by a graduate student, by an alien graduate student.
7
SPEAKER_00
So I know the exact episodes of Star Trek you re talking about.
7
SPEAKER_01
But there is some, to me that s inspiring.
7
SPEAKER_01
If we are
7
SPEAKER_00
But that s not what panspermia is about.
7
SPEAKER_00
You re talking about my proposition.
7
SPEAKER_00
That s not what panspermia is.
7
SPEAKER_01
What s panspermia?
7
SPEAKER_01
Oh, life just came from elsewhere.
7
SPEAKER_00
Mm-hmm.
7
SPEAKER_01
Still that s interesting because there s still giant leaps that happened on Earth, it seems like, beyond the initial primitive organisms like eukaryotes.
7
SPEAKER_00
I don t think panspermia usually articulates at the level of eukaryotes.
7
SPEAKER_00
I think they talk about
7
SPEAKER_00
but bacteria primarily, I think so.
7
SPEAKER_01
Right.
7
SPEAKER_01
So that s still interesting, because all the different leaps of evolution still happen here on Earth.
7
SPEAKER_01
That s still interesting.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, but it s, I mean, it s definitely,
7
SPEAKER_00
interesting to listen to, but I wouldn t place it in, I wouldn t know how to place it in the studies of origin of life, I guess, or early life.
7
SPEAKER_01
Here s how we place it.
7
SPEAKER_01
You have the initial conditions for the origin of life, and you try to create life in that way that you ve described in the five components, and it keeps failing.
7
SPEAKER_01
So what panspermia allows you to do is to also consider the question,
7
SPEAKER_01
maybe there s missing components.
7
SPEAKER_00
How do you answer that question?
7
SPEAKER_01
Through exploration and through science.
7
SPEAKER_01
Looking outside of Earth, looking at the fundamentals of chemistry and physics.
7
SPEAKER_00
How do you understand that with fundamentals of chemistry and physics?
7
SPEAKER_01
How do you understand gravity?
7
SPEAKER_00
But you re talking about panspermia, right?
7
SPEAKER_00
Just I don t understand how would you, it s different than, if you think it s similar to looking for life in the universe, is that what you re thinking?
7
SPEAKER_01
No, I m saying there s a missing component that came from elsewhere.
7
SPEAKER_00
But a whole entire organism is not a missing component like that, right?
7
SPEAKER_00
I mean, when you re thinking about origin of life.
7
SPEAKER_01
No, no, no, that s an assumption.
7
SPEAKER_01
Your assumption is all the ingredients for the origin of life are here on Earth.
7
SPEAKER_01
Now, I tend to believe that most likely that s the case.
7
SPEAKER_01
I m just saying it s inspiring to think that there is some ingredients
7
SPEAKER_01
you re gonna push back, because that s not past permeate.
7
SPEAKER_01
That s part of this, but.
7
SPEAKER_00
See, okay, so think, but yeah.
7
SPEAKER_01
It s also kind of fun to push back on you.
7
SPEAKER_01
No, I understand, I understand.
7
SPEAKER_01
I understand if actually a living organism,
7
SPEAKER_01
ended up here from elsewhere.
7
SPEAKER_01
That means a lot of the exploration we re doing here with the ingredients that we know will not give us the clues to the origin of life.
7
SPEAKER_01
But it just seems like it s still very useful to try to create life here, and then we ll see, wait a minute, don t you think we ll be able to
7
SPEAKER_01
prove, not prove, but show that past Burma is very likely.
7
SPEAKER_01
Like if we just keep failing, we understand biology deeply, we understand chemistry deeply.
7
SPEAKER_00
I don t think so.
7
SPEAKER_00
I mean, there will be, the failure is not gonna indicate that this must have been, I don t think anyone will put the problem to something else just because our failures, our experiments failed.
7
SPEAKER_01
So failure means we don t understand the chemistry deeply enough.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, and given the progress we made, and how many brilliant people are working on this right now, and it s definitely more, I would say that we are approaching this problem in more broader ways, with different ways possible.
7
SPEAKER_00
I m confident that we will get there.
7
SPEAKER_00
For us, again, we are interested in finding
7
SPEAKER_00
early cells and first cells and what followed origin of life, but we cannot, given that it s a continuum, that s between the origin and emergence of first cells, it s hard to separate these two ends from one another.
7
SPEAKER_01
So given that life is a solution to a chemistry problem, if we re-ran Earth a million times, how different would
7
SPEAKER_01
the results be?
7
SPEAKER_01
If we look at that wheel, how different would be the tree of life, do you think?
7
SPEAKER_01
Like, what s your gut say?
7
SPEAKER_00
My mind asks, are you imagining, if you re repeating the planet one million times, are we seeing, are the things that happened, I m not talking at the chemical level, but at the environment level,
7
SPEAKER_00
Do they happen at the same time, at the same frequency, at the same intensity every time you re running this tape over and over again?
7
SPEAKER_01
Yes, you mean like geological stuff.
7
SPEAKER_00
So you re saying those are important.
7
SPEAKER_01
I mean, the fact that you would ask that question is also fascinating.
7
SPEAKER_01
So that s important?
7
SPEAKER_01
The timing, the frequency, the intensity of geological events?
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so when we run this imaginary rewind and replay experiments in our minds, I wanna know whether we are positioning all the same geologic events at the same chronological order as well, or whether we are also giving them more randomness.
7
SPEAKER_00
So if the volcano erupted, is it happening at the same time?
7
SPEAKER_00
If you have a, are dinosaurs getting wiped off every time with the same meteorite that s hitting the same?
7
SPEAKER_01
But also like temperature changes and all that kind of stuff.
7
SPEAKER_00
Temperature changes, everything.
7
SPEAKER_01
That s actually, I ve heard you say somewhere that one of the things that s fascinating to you about this whole process of evolution is that the process of evolution, all the mechanisms were invented and developed
7
SPEAKER_01
despite all the variation geologically, through the hardship that Earth has gone through.
7
SPEAKER_00
That the biological innovations persisted despite that?
7
SPEAKER_01
Persisted, yeah, despite that, which is interesting.
7
SPEAKER_01
You kind of think of the biological innovations kind of happening on their own.
7
SPEAKER_00
Because we, so we actually have a center exploring this problem.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
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SPEAKER_00
we want to understand whether it s almost like judging a book by its cover, right?
7
SPEAKER_00
Do you just look at an environment and then see whatever is present or scarce in that environment and then think that, okay, the life form that will exist in this environment will obviously have a lot of molybdenum in its system.
7
SPEAKER_00
Look at all this molybdenum around here.
7
SPEAKER_00
Or will it be... Because if you say that, you are now putting the environment in the more prime driver role, right?
7
SPEAKER_00
You re saying that environment will determine what biology will or will not use.
7
SPEAKER_00
But we ve done studies that show that it s not necessarily this straightforward.
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SPEAKER_00
For instance, we looked at going back to nitrogen.
7
SPEAKER_00
One thing that s fascinating about the way cells fix nitrogen, the ones that can do, is that they also do this through a lot of help of a lot of metals, a lot of elemental support really.
7
SPEAKER_00
and which geologists use to understand where did this metabolism even evolve where at first place.
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SPEAKER_00
So we look at ancient oceans, we try to understand the elemental composition of ancient oceans.
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SPEAKER_00
And what we see is that in some cases, the metabolisms, even though they prefer a certain metal or an element that is in the environment,
7
SPEAKER_00
that metal wasn t abundant in the environment, but still life chose that.
7
SPEAKER_00
So it s not that straightforward as though whatever, you are what you eat, but you don t necessarily eat what is obvious to you.
7
SPEAKER_00
Just because there s a lot of that food around, it doesn t mean life will ultimately go there.
7
SPEAKER_00
Maybe most of the time it will, but it seems like in the case of nitrogen fixation, it didn t, and maybe that made the difference.
7
SPEAKER_01
It s so cool that, right, it s not the abundant resource that s going to be the definition of what kind of life flourishes.
7
SPEAKER_01
So it s not a straightforward thing.
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SPEAKER_01
But your sense is that the different timing, the different conditions of the environment would change the way evolution happens.
7
SPEAKER_00
For instance, I think it s in the 80s, maybe earlier than that, Stephen Jay Gould s book, Wonderful Life, which changed, I think, a lot of scientists  life, including mine.
7
SPEAKER_00
He contemplates on this notion of the tape of life, of course,
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SPEAKER_00
I hope people still know what tape is, but I think your listeners will know what tape is.
7
SPEAKER_00
I don t know.
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SPEAKER_00
It s the... Tape?
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SPEAKER_01
Go on, tell me about the tape.
7
SPEAKER_01
Is it like a TikTok?
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SPEAKER_01
Can you swipe on it?
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SPEAKER_01
I m sorry, go ahead.
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SPEAKER_01
I apologize for my rude interruption.
7
SPEAKER_00
I can t ask for it.
7
SPEAKER_00
But he speculated or he suggested this hypothetical experiment, whether if life was recorded on, or can be imagined to be recorded on a linear, is it linear chain of events recorded on a tape, and if we were to rewind the tape, would we listen to the same song, right?
7
SPEAKER_00
So this was, and in his proposition, I also thought,
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, but are we replaying the tape in the same exact manner or are we meaning all the geological and environmental events, are they happening at the same time?
7
SPEAKER_00
Because then you removed the randomness from equation a little bit, right?
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SPEAKER_00
You just removed it because you re assuming everything will happen at the same time, at the same intensity, so that s not too contingent.
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SPEAKER_00
That means that the natural selection you re thinking is really operating at more or evolution is operating at more under more random forces than that can be dictated by the environment.
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SPEAKER_00
So in our way of understanding or thinking about rewinding, replaying, I don t think we re thinking about the role of the environment as clearly or don t seem to be integrated as much.
7
SPEAKER_01
But I also wonder if it s possible that the chemistry ultimately defines the destination.
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SPEAKER_01
That despite all the environmental changes, despite all the randomness, we ll end up in something.
7
SPEAKER_00
But we are not talking about whether life will emerge and sustain itself.
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SPEAKER_00
We are talking about whether life will emerge and sustain itself in the shape and form that is similar to what we have right now.
7
SPEAKER_00
So you are chemistry, I m chemistry, we re having this conversation, and your plants are chemistry too.
7
SPEAKER_00
They re also having their own conversation.
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SPEAKER_01
These plants are fake, but yes.
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SPEAKER_00
I didn t want to say that, but they re fake.
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SPEAKER_01
Do you look at my place?
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SPEAKER_01
Of course they would be fake, otherwise they would die.
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SPEAKER_00
What s wrong with this place?
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SPEAKER_01
It s wonderful.
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SPEAKER_01
I m Alice and this is Wonderland.
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SPEAKER_01
This is great.
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SPEAKER_01
This is great.
7
SPEAKER_01
It s just that, you know, this is a place where robots flourish and those plants are fake.
7
SPEAKER_00
Are you saying that you and I are the only living organisms?
7
SPEAKER_00
Well, obviously there are microbes in this room, but- Yeah, we are the only living organisms.
7
SPEAKER_01
Let s take care of getting a dog.
7
SPEAKER_00
Well, this is not a clean room, so you have microbes here.
7
SPEAKER_01
Yes, many, millions.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yes, so you and I and all the microbes in this room, we are chemical systems that are operating in a way that we can respond and sense our environments and whatnot.
7
SPEAKER_00
But if you are asking if we are gonna be here, then you re imagining that another solution is also possible, which is different.
7
SPEAKER_00
than the fundamentals of life.
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SPEAKER_00
Because life will do always, life will do its life thing.
7
SPEAKER_01
I guess it goes all the way back to the things we were talking about translation and the stuff you were messing with is figuring out what is the important stuff and what isn t.
7
SPEAKER_01
Makes me wonder about, you know, just like with the translation machinery with human beings, I wonder what s the important stuff.
7
SPEAKER_01
Is it important to have two limbs?
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SPEAKER_01
Is it important to have eyes?
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SPEAKER_01
Like it was obvious that the sensory mechanism of eyes, like sight, were to develop.
7
SPEAKER_01
How many times if we re-reinter Earth would the sensory mechanism of sight develop?
7
SPEAKER_01
And what would it look like?
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SPEAKER_01
Would it be one giant eye?
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SPEAKER_01
Or would it be two?
7
SPEAKER_01
What s with the symmetry?
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SPEAKER_01
Why are we so damn symmetrical?
7
SPEAKER_00
In response to Steve Jay Gould s proposition,
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SPEAKER_00
most people who argue that life is convergent and it will in fact lead to a few determined outcomes.
7
SPEAKER_00
It s not that the outcome is determined per se, but the pathways are restricted and the mutational trajectories that life can act upon are already very limited so that the final outcomes are a few and eyes being one of them.
7
SPEAKER_00
the convergence at the eye level was suggested as an example, was presented as an example of why life may actually embark on the same solution over and over again, given that many species evolved independently from one another.
7
SPEAKER_01
Do you think there s any inkling of truth to that?
7
SPEAKER_01
Is it just us humans thinking we re special?
7
SPEAKER_00
I think those innovations came again so far after the... I know it s the fun stuff, yes.
7
SPEAKER_00
Because it s... Thank you.
7
SPEAKER_01
I mean, thank you.
7
SPEAKER_01
We humans tend to talk about the later stuff, but without the earlier stuff, we wouldn t have the better stuff.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so when we think of earlier, there s...
7
SPEAKER_00
And I ask this to my students too.
7
SPEAKER_00
I want them to close their eyes and think about just nothingness but dust.
7
SPEAKER_00
We don t have trees, we don t have plants.
7
SPEAKER_00
When we say an empty place, or visually at least, we are talking about a planet that is really alien.
7
SPEAKER_00
So understanding our own past is similar to understanding an alien planet altogether.
7
SPEAKER_00
given that it is a very different planet that did not have any oxygen for two billion years.
7
SPEAKER_00
There s nothing that is familiar to us that we would even think about when we think about life that is present in our past, yet here we are.
7
SPEAKER_01
So cool that from that came this, like houses and people.
7
SPEAKER_00
And we are the super late arrivals to the party, right?
7
SPEAKER_00
So this is definitely not our planet.
7
SPEAKER_00
It s the microbial planets that we live in.
7
SPEAKER_01
But the potential to create us was always there.
7
SPEAKER_00
How do you know that?
7
SPEAKER_01
Because we were created.
7
SPEAKER_01
Oh, I don t know.
7
SPEAKER_01
You think it s possible that it s, even for the early stuff, yeah, maybe if it s super unlikely, yeah, that we just got super, this is the planet that got really lucky given the chemistry.
7
SPEAKER_01
Like maybe to create the bacteria is not so lucky, but to create complex organisms all the way up to mammals, that s super lucky.
7
SPEAKER_00
Maybe.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yes, and it may all come down to a few innovations that happened at the molecular level that may or may not be inevitable.
7
SPEAKER_00
So all these molecular tricks may have enabled the sort of mere existence of whatever you are able to define as familiar to yourself.
7
SPEAKER_01
And you have a hope that science can answer these questions.
8
SPEAKER_01
to reconstruct?
8
SPEAKER_00
Science is answering these questions.
8
SPEAKER_00
I mean, we are limited to going back to the beginning in our ways, right?
8
SPEAKER_00
So we rely on biology, it says overwritten, you re talking about four billion year old records that is ever changing, that again makes it beautiful, but also makes it difficult.
8
SPEAKER_00
It s not tractable.
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SPEAKER_00
Geology has,
8
SPEAKER_00
to some degree, it has a record of a more static, frozen state record that is embedded on itself, on the surface of this planet, if we can find them.
8
SPEAKER_00
And that s the key, that most of these recorded remnants are
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SPEAKER_00
If we re lucky, we find them.
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SPEAKER_00
They re not naturally selected.
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SPEAKER_00
They re found, they need to be found for us to read them.
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SPEAKER_00
So we work with a very handful set of samples, especially when we talk about the deep past,
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SPEAKER_00
planet with no oxygen when we pass the Great Oxidation Event threshold that is about 2.5 billion years.
8
SPEAKER_00
So the earliest life is even harder.
8
SPEAKER_00
You are trying to write the story of life based on a handful of rocks and what is recorded on them.
8
SPEAKER_01
Speaking of finding select remnants of our deep past, you said that you ve been thinking about Nick Nealon s essay on scientific knowledge and scientific abstraction.
8
SPEAKER_01
So let me ask you, where do you think scientific questions and answers or in general ideas come from?
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SPEAKER_01
You re a scientist, you ask very good questions, and try systematically and rigorously to answer them through experiment.
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SPEAKER_01
Where do you think ideas come from?
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SPEAKER_00
So ideas come all the time, right?
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SPEAKER_00
There are all kinds of ideas.
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SPEAKER_00
There are good ideas, there are not so good ideas.
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SPEAKER_00
There are really exciting ideas, maybe some boring ones.
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SPEAKER_00
But if you,
8
SPEAKER_00
are you really interested in doing something different, then you need to be willing to take the risk to be wrong.
8
SPEAKER_00
And that s incredibly difficult, even though we talked about the idealist notion behind science that we ultimately want to be rejected, or our ideas need to be rejected for the entire infrastructure to move forward.
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SPEAKER_00
There is a level of risk-taking, I think, behind
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SPEAKER_00
any creative idea, and I mean that in a true sense.
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SPEAKER_00
If you are disappointed that your idea didn t work, then it wasn t a risk, because you still hoped that it will work.
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SPEAKER_00
True risk is that you accept that it may not work, so that the failure shouldn t also surprise you.
8
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
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SPEAKER_01
Is it when you embark on stuff, when you embark on an idea, do you actually
8
SPEAKER_01
contemplate and accept failure as a possibility?
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SPEAKER_00
Not consciously, I wouldn t say so, but I eliminated a lot of the things out of my work line by simply not feeling like studying them.
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SPEAKER_00
I was bored chasing certain questions.
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SPEAKER_01
And I- So you trusted the signal of boredom as a good sign that it s not a good question.
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SPEAKER_00
Yes, it should definitely be, whatever you re doing should be exciting to you.
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SPEAKER_00
If there s only one person that should be ever excited about what you re doing, that should be you.
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SPEAKER_00
And that s enough for that idea to go somewhere.
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SPEAKER_00
I think that you need to believe
8
SPEAKER_00
in the idea.
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SPEAKER_00
But at the same time, I think it s important to not fall in love with your mistakes.
8
SPEAKER_00
If something isn t working, you should let it go instead of trying to fix it.
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SPEAKER_00
Even though you feel that this is a mistake or you know that it s a mistake, instead of trying to fix it, you should
8
SPEAKER_00
wrap it up and move on to something else, which is incredibly hard.
8
SPEAKER_01
Good advice for science, but also good advice for relationships.
8
SPEAKER_01
But okay, so that s actually really hard, especially, I mean, this is like PhD stuff, like if you sink in so much of your time, not even PhD, the entire scientific career is, it s really tough to let go.
8
SPEAKER_00
Yes, and there is not a lot of room for true freedom.
8
SPEAKER_00
maybe at this certain degree.
8
SPEAKER_00
So first you need to be trained, right?
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SPEAKER_00
It s not that scientists are just brilliant, amazing humans.
8
SPEAKER_00
I mean, they just know and learn how, they know how to do science because they re trained in how to do science.
8
SPEAKER_00
So that is important because I,
8
SPEAKER_00
As someone who wants to definitely, I m hoping, giving the message that this is for everybody, that there s this notion of scientists being super smart people, that s definitely not true.
8
SPEAKER_00
It is a method that you learn to solve a problem.
8
SPEAKER_00
That s really what science is.
8
SPEAKER_00
And some are really good at it, and they get better at it under really good guidance, maybe good mentorship.
8
SPEAKER_00
And ultimately, everyone finds their own style of problem solving and what sort of problems they solve.
8
SPEAKER_00
But I have not met a scientist that finds their own pursuit boring.
8
SPEAKER_01
Well, it can happen, but they re not going to be effective, just like you said.
8
SPEAKER_01
It s kind of interesting because in the age of social media and attention economies and stuff like that, I ve interacted with a lot of folks like YouTubers and so on.
8
SPEAKER_01
I think a lot of their work is driven by what others find exciting.
8
SPEAKER_01
And I think that ultimately leads to a life that s not fulfilling.
8
SPEAKER_00
I can see the reason behind it, or perhaps there s a fear of failure that can be a major determinant of that pattern, right?
8
SPEAKER_00
So you try to do something that is accepted by others because that s maybe unlikely to give results right away.
8
SPEAKER_00
But it s a long game.
8
SPEAKER_00
It s a very long game.
8
SPEAKER_00
And if you are aiming a long term change and long term impact, you ve got to be very, very patient about it.
8
SPEAKER_00
And you better tame your ego.
8
SPEAKER_01
I mean, on YouTube and those kinds of places on the internet, on social media, you get feedback like right away.
8
SPEAKER_01
And so it s even harder to be patient.
8
SPEAKER_01
Because yeah, change and ideas develop over a period of months and years, not decades.
8
SPEAKER_01
And the response from social media and so on is on the rate of seconds, minutes, and hours.
8
SPEAKER_00
I recommend actual physical libraries for people who may want to appreciate or remember the sense of time and how long it takes to build something.
8
SPEAKER_00
I think you re right that the immediacy and the right response and the fact that these
8
SPEAKER_00
places, the algorithm wants you to respond right away and interact with itself, right?
8
SPEAKER_00
So I can see the appeal.
8
SPEAKER_00
But true innovation, I think, doesn t even scream.
8
SPEAKER_00
It s not shiny, especially in the beginning.
8
SPEAKER_00
But it s also important to not fool ourselves and think that everything that people criticize has some super important meaning behind it.
8
SPEAKER_00
So it s a mix of the technique, the methods, and your gut feeling.
8
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and a weird dance between learning and accepting the ideas of the current science, and at times trusting your gut and rejecting those.
8
SPEAKER_01
Because science progresses by sometimes rejecting the ideas of the past, or sometimes building on them in a way that changes them, transforms them.
8
SPEAKER_00
Yes, and I think what is hard is to really drill down into a concept, right?
8
SPEAKER_00
So you can create a new thing, and then it may be appealing and gain a lot of traction, but to sustain that, to continue that, you really need to show the true expertise.
8
SPEAKER_00
And so it s not only about defining a problem, but then really systematically solve that problem, maybe over the course of decades.
8
SPEAKER_01
You mentioned the library.
8
SPEAKER_01
I ve also saw that you ve translated scientific documents, or at least mentioned that you did it at some point in your life.
8
SPEAKER_01
So let me ask you, how much do you think is lost in translation, in science and in life?
8
SPEAKER_01
How many languages do you speak?
8
SPEAKER_00
Two.
8
SPEAKER_01
Two.
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SPEAKER_01
How much is lost in translation, in science and in life between those two?
8
SPEAKER_00
It s actually three because science is like another language, right?
8
SPEAKER_01
It is.
8
SPEAKER_01
I speak Russian, a little bit of French.
8
SPEAKER_01
And it s always fascinating to see how much is lost.
8
SPEAKER_01
And the Soviet Union has a tradition of science and mathematics and so on.
8
SPEAKER_01
And it s interesting that a lot of the wisdom gained from that part of the world is lost, basically because it was never translated.
8
SPEAKER_00
Well, I m not sure if it is lost per se.
8
SPEAKER_00
Maybe it s more like a gain in some sense, right?
8
SPEAKER_00
Because you understand and
8
SPEAKER_00
Science is ultimately a human pursuit, so you cannot separate as much as, maybe it s the best system that humans ever came up with to seek knowledge, to generate and make sense of the world.
8
SPEAKER_00
It works most of the time, it doesn t mean it s perfect.
8
SPEAKER_01
Did the kind of translation you do, by the way, was for scientific work?
8
SPEAKER_00
I directly translate it for scientific work, yes.
8
SPEAKER_00
I think that, again, brains are equally distributed, but opportunities are not, right?
8
SPEAKER_00
want to include, if you want to benefit from all human power, whatever we can generate as human beings, you need to include everybody on the table, and that is by extending the opportunity.
8
SPEAKER_00
I think most of us that make it tend to think that we did because of something special about ourselves, but it is important to know that no, we were given opportunities, and that s why we are here, not because
8
SPEAKER_00
there was something inherently special about us or that the system truly selects for the ones that really are.
8
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and language is a part of the opportunity.
8
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, language is an opportunity because it comes with, similar to bacteria, right?
8
SPEAKER_00
They speak these languages.
8
SPEAKER_00
Even we call this, we call culturing the bacteria, we call it culturing, right?
8
SPEAKER_00
When we grow bacteria that we isolate from the environment in the lab.
8
SPEAKER_00
meaning that you create an environment for them to grow and thrive and sustain themselves.
8
SPEAKER_00
That s what we say, what culture is for microbiologists.
8
SPEAKER_00
With language comes a different culture, a different perspective, and you bring that to the table.
8
SPEAKER_00
I mean,
8
SPEAKER_00
it brings the sense of diversity that can only be achieved by clashing perhaps two different cultures, two different languages, two different approaches, maybe in some cases, four different approaches.
8
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I think language is not just a mechanism of communication.
8
SPEAKER_01
It s a way to, it s a dynamic system of exploring ideas.
8
SPEAKER_01
And it s interesting to see that different languages explores ideas differently.
8
SPEAKER_00
Yes, and I think that, so when I said science is like a language itself, I said it in two different ways.
8
SPEAKER_00
One is very literal meaning, that you can speak English, but that doesn t mean you will understand the scientific paper.
8
SPEAKER_00
It s a different level of English that you need to learn to understand.
8
SPEAKER_00
Not just for scientific papers, even from discipline to discipline.
8
SPEAKER_00
I challenge any chemist to read an evolutionary biology paper.
8
SPEAKER_00
And vice versa.
8
SPEAKER_00
It may sound extremely different, a different language altogether.
8
SPEAKER_00
But there s also the language of communicating, and because words matter, how we talk matter, how we represent our science matters.
8
SPEAKER_00
So yes, just learning English as a second language alone is not going to make you fluent in science either.
8
SPEAKER_01
And it s interesting, because in that sense, you speak many more than three languages, because you re pretty cross-disciplinary.
8
SPEAKER_01
It seems like you have a foot in a lot of disciplines.
8
SPEAKER_01
I mean, you mentioned geology, biology, evolutionary biology, I mean, there s chemistry.
8
SPEAKER_00
Biochemistry, biophysics, even we do a lot of statistics.
8
SPEAKER_00
So there s a lot of mathematics to what we do as well.
8
SPEAKER_00
Yes, we like to think of it as this,
8
SPEAKER_00
Nell s Astrobiology Program says, I repeat it because it s fun, that it is not a fruit salad, but it s a smoothie, that that s what we are generating.
8
SPEAKER_01
It s not a fruit salad.
8
SPEAKER_01
So a smoothie is a successful combination of those fields, and a fruit salad is not.
8
SPEAKER_00
I wouldn t say it s success unnecessarily.
8
SPEAKER_00
If you put the wrong ingredient and you press the blender and you made it a smoothie, it can ruin the entire mix.
8
SPEAKER_01
Can it though?
8
SPEAKER_00
Because I feel like... Yes, I can definitely assess that for ginger first.
8
SPEAKER_00
It ruins every smoothie.
8
SPEAKER_00
I don t like it.
8
SPEAKER_00
Ginger?
8
SPEAKER_00
I think so.
8
SPEAKER_00
But it s just a personal thing.
8
SPEAKER_00
And also I don t like cinnamon.
8
SPEAKER_01
Oh, the ginger has a cinnamony taste?
8
SPEAKER_01
Because I thought ginger was... No, I don t think they do, but I also don t like... Wasn t that a thing they add in a lot of smoothies?
8
SPEAKER_01
I was forced a smoothie.
8
SPEAKER_01
I went to Malibu with a good friend of mine, Dan Reynolds, and he forced me to consume a smoothie.
8
SPEAKER_01
And, you know, it s probably the first smoothie I ve ever had.
8
SPEAKER_01
Because I always was very judgmental of the kind of places and people that drink smoothies.
8
SPEAKER_01
But it was good.
8
SPEAKER_01
It was good.
8
SPEAKER_00
Well, smoothie is very American, so I...
8
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it is an American thing.
8
SPEAKER_00
I wouldn t say success per se, but it is true that when you dance at the edge of different disciplines, that s when inevitably the innovation will rise because you will see things maybe a little differently when you re on the edge, right?
8
SPEAKER_00
But it will probably take longer and it may not be understood right away.
8
SPEAKER_00
It may not come into final form quickly, given that it is a new concept rising.
8
SPEAKER_00
So therefore the patience will make more sense, I m sorry, patience will be even more important.
8
SPEAKER_00
So if you are, in other words, if you are into immediate appreciation, that s probably not the way to go.
8
SPEAKER_01
You re one chemical organism, so let me ask maybe a little bit more of a personal thing.
8
SPEAKER_01
Where did your life form originate?
8
SPEAKER_01
And what fond memory do you have from the early days of childhood that are representative of your bacteria culture?
8
SPEAKER_00
I was born in Istanbul, so I grew up in Turkey.
8
SPEAKER_00
a city that has two continents, which is quite interesting.
8
SPEAKER_00
You see a welcome to Europe sign and then welcome to Asia sign the same day, depending on which part of the bridge you are.
8
SPEAKER_00
So that s where I was born and I spent about roughly 20 years of my life and then I immigrated to the United States.
8
SPEAKER_01
And it s a very proud culture, it s a beautiful culture, it s a very flavorful culture.
8
SPEAKER_01
What aspects of it is part of who you are?
8
SPEAKER_01
What are the beautiful aspects that you carry with you in your heart?
8
SPEAKER_00
I think we are very sincerely human as a culture.
8
SPEAKER_00
I think that we have the saying that don t go to bed full if your neighbor is hungry.
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you wouldn t eat any food in front of someone where I come from without offering to share the bite.
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So I think those things, however small they may sound, a really big deal, especially when you are put in or move to a place that may not have those attributes.
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So I think that culturally
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we had a lot of conscious, just raw, deep human.
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The connection, the value of the connection between human beings.
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I think so, yeah.
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I think I definitely carried that with me.
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We talk a lot about biology.
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Let me ask you about the romantic question.
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What role does love play in the human condition or in the entirety of life on Earth?
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It s not easy to learn how to love if you re not loved.
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But the good news is that it is something that you can learn, I think.
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You can practice and teach yourself how to maybe give yourself the thing that wasn t given to you and then ultimately give it to others.
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I think it would be quite...
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arrogant to think that we will be capable of loving, it could be anything really.
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So just like translation, it s a repeating and a dynamical process.
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That you can learn.
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Yeah, that you can learn.
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Yes, and you should learn.
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There s no excuse to not learning.
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To love.
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Yeah.
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Because that s a deeply human thing.
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It is a deeply human thing.
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It is a very sad thing if any one of us passes this planet without knowing what love is.
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And that could be a love to a pet, a love to a plant.
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To a robot.
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Just kidding.
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Or a fake plant.
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We love, we can t help who we love.
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What advice would you give to a young person today?
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High school, college?
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how to have a career they can be proud of or how to have a life they can be proud of.
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You said an interesting thing about brains being distributed evenly but opportunities not.
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It s really interesting to think about.
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I ve talked to folks from Africa.
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You realize that there s whole areas of this earth
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that have so much brilliance, but unfortunately so little opportunity.
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And one of the exciting things about the 21st century is more and more opportunities are created, and so the brilliance is unlocked in all those different places.
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And so all these young people now have the opportunity to do something to change the world.
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I had a chance to visit Bosnia.
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So I was invited to give a talk in a very northern most part of the country that was impacted by the war tremendously.
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And it was a public talk, it was open to everybody in the village.
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And I was told even people drew from Sarajevo to attend.
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Whenever I think about...
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our role as a scientist or the beneficiaries of the knowledge that we create.
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I always think about that night, that s how many people were in that room.
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It was incredibly crowded and lots of young people who were trying to start everything new and not do or not carry
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sort of replace whatever maybe the feeling that was taken from them with hope and love, start a new beginning, be the seed for the next generation.
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And it moved me so much that they all came to hear about early life space, something maybe different for them that maybe they were always interested in and never thought about.
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But what stayed with me was just the look and the feeling, the look on their faces and the feeling in the room, the energy just was really moving to me.
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Their willingness to be the seed, the first of their family and generation to do that big new thing.
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Yes, and that s exactly why I m telling this whole story, because for most of us, we may have to be that seed in our families, the first one to do something new, to break that cycle, whatever it is that you want to break free from.
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I would want the young people to know that you can be that, that there are
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just wonderful things to learn from this life, and it s just incredible to be living.
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And I would want them to know that their voice matters, and they need to use it, especially those who think that their voice doesn t matter.
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And ultimately, I think what it comes down to is to trusting yourself, trusting and respecting your voice.
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If you re not loved, learn how to love.
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If you are not respected, start by respecting yourself.
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Learn how to respect yourself.
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You can teach yourself things.
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Yeah, it s really difficult when you re surrounded by people that don t believe in you.
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Yes, I definitely know the feeling and I would just want them to know that they don t need to be defined by or reduced down to what others see in them.
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Believe in yourself, have the respect, try to develop the respect and the love for yourself.
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And then from that, it flourishes.
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You ll find others that ll give you love.
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It may not.
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I mean, life is not fair, it s true.
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Be prepared that it s not very fair, unfortunately.
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And so I don t wanna depict this Disney story that, and then yes, and everything will be just fine.
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It s mostly isn t, but you learn a way, learn, you know, life does it all the time.
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Speaking of which, what do you think is the meaning of all this?
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What s the meaning of life?
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Why are we here?
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Why we are here?
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All the beauty you ve discussed, why,
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is the translational mechanism, machinery here.
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Why?
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Why so much beauty?
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Why so much beauty?
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It is because we choose to see it that way, it s beautiful.
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But there is no meaning, I don t think, no, yeah.
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But why is it so beautiful?
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Why did we choose?
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Why?
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From where is the imperative to see so much beauty in a thing that scientifically speaking or from a rational perspective is void of beauty?
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It just is.
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Why?
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Not everybody chooses to see the beauty.
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Hate is gonna hate.
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I mean, we have the capacity to see the beauty.
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We have the capacity, so why not use it to the fullest, right?
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We have the capacity.
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But that capacity, isn t that fascinating that we developed that?
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It feels like that was always laid in there in the whole process of life, this ability to find, to introspect ourselves.
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I mean, it s definitely soothing to think like that, but I don t think there is a meaning like that way.
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It s fascinating that we can understand it.
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But why is it soothing?
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There s a desire, there s a longing.
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But soothing doesn t mean
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that there s a meaning.
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Why is soothing a meaning?
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Let me just put it this way.
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Because there is just, I think, so much unfairness going on, I wouldn t even dare myself to think that there s a meaning out of respect to the ones that are suffering.
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I see.
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I think
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I think out of suffering emerges flourishing and beauty.
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I mean, that s what I see.
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I agree with you.
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When I went to Ukraine, it s all the people suffering.
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In their eyes and in their stories is a hope for the future, is a love for the people who are still living, is a love for life.
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So it s there.
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And that s the dark thing, is the suffering.
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And the law somehow intensifies your appreciation of the life that is to the left.
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That s a weird thing too.
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I think that there is something about still doing your best and believing that whatever goodness is worth working for is beyond, and to do that without a meaning
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there s something more humbling and profound about that.
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And we have a, this will come out very random, okay, so just.
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In Turkish bathrooms, there is this sign that says, leave it as you want to find it.
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Yeah.
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And I think that s a pretty good- That s your meaning of life found in Turkey.
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There s wisdom to that.
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There s wisdom to that, but also it s because however you live defines you, right?
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So I think there s some profound meaning to that too, that just leave it as you would want to find it.
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So that your little scribble in the long story of life on Earth is one that ultimately did a pretty good job.
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At least kept it the same as you found it.
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Or at least I left it in the way that I wish I found it.
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Yeah, right.
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Oh man.
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Yes, that s the wisdom from Turkish bathrooms.
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That s where I search for wisdom as well.
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And as we started with the origin of life and ended with the wisdom in a Turkish bathroom, I think that s a perfect conversation.
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You re an incredible person.
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The humor, the humanity, but also the brilliance of your work.
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I really appreciate that you were talking to me today.
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This was really fun.
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Thanks for having me.
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Thanks for listening to this conversation with Batool Kachar.
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To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
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And now, let me leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Robert Frost.
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In three words, I can sum up everything I ve ever learned about life.
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It goes on.
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Thank you for listening.
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I hope to see you next time.
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