Life as a Guide to the Origin of Life - with Professor Nick Lane
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 5 ต.ค. 2024
- The idea that we use biology as well as chemistry as a guide to the origin of life has been largely missing from origins research. Professor Lane gave an overview of recent thinking and experiments on how life might have begun from H2 and CO2 in far-from-equilibrium environments.
Professor Nick Lane - evolutionary biochemist and award-winning author, Professor of Evolutionary Biochemistry in the Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment, University College London.
Professor Lane’s research focuses on three major transitions in evolution: the origin of life itself; the origin of the eukaryotic cell; and the evolution of fundamental traits shared by all eukaryotic cells, notably sex, sexes, speciation and senescence. He is exploring the hypothesis that energetics played a critical role in each transition, addressing specific questions theoretically, and by mathematical modelling, chemical and biochemical experiments.
He was a founding member of the UCL Consortium for Mitochondrial Research and is Co-Director of CLOE, UCL’s new Centre for Life’s Origins and Evolution. He has published celebrated books, which have been translated into 25 languages, and is a regular contributor to TV and radio as well as scientific and literary festivals. His book Life Ascending won the Royal Society Prize for Science Books in 2010, while Bill Gates praised The Vital Question as “a stunning inquiry into the origins of life”.
Professor Lane’s work was recognised by the 2015 Biochemical Society Award for his outstanding contribution to the molecular bio-sciences, and the 2016 Royal Society Michael Faraday Prize, the UK’s premier award for excellence in communicating science.
I never tire of listening to, and being educated by, the brilliant Nick Lane.
I appreciate how Dr. Lane readily admits what is speculation as well as his personal lack of knowledge.
I tend to spend a lot more time viewing, listening and learning from people like Mr. Lane who possess this quality of personality!
@@eyeq7730 🍻
In 1965, I entered UCL Medical School when biochemistry certainly wasn't as exciting as today. The Origin of Life was stuck in the nebulous "Primordial Soup". Watson and Crick had received the Nobel Prize in 1962 and the structure of DNA was a wonder to behold. We have come a long, long way in the subsequent almost 60 years.
Thanks for uploading this, Dr. Lane is a genius and a super communicator.
I only came across Dr. Lane a few months ago and thought I had seen all vids he was featured in on TH-cam, however I'm delighted i'm getting another hour of him speaking!
S
o interesting he speakers in the ways. . times and chance.
I wish you would do more public lectures.
Thank you for your work.
A set of questions I wish I could ask is: has recent work and understanding of metabolomes, and related multi-omics, provided insight into proto-metabollism? Are there certain extant organisms which might be good models for the work you are doing, and where work on their metabolomes could drive your research forward? What tools coming out of metabolome research seem promising for your work?
Friends of Imperial College are directed to a book soon to be published towards the end of October by Austin Macauley Publishers titled " From Chemistry to Life on Earth " outlining in detail the origin of the genetic code and the ribosome as well as a thorough scenario from prebiotic chemistry all the way up to the Animalia.
Whoa, congrats on the amino acid synthesis! Especially cysteine, which I've read is notoriously hard to produce but (as you also say) massively important for catalysis. This seems like a huge blow to the cyanosulfidic theory, if cyanides are no longer necessary and you can really achieve this in a one-pot system
Realy I like this video so much
Nick!
Do me a favor and post a guide from your science lectures pls and thank you
Consider his books for that. Transformer has a good bit of what th talked about in this lecture (minus the recent research, of course).
The 2015 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to researchers who discovered that DNA is very unstable. That surprising discovery led them to predict and then discover error correction machinery that counters that instability. Without that error correction machinery DNA-based life would be impossible.
That ran counter to the expectation that DNA was stable and that is why it won out over the instable RNA. But now one has to ask how could blind, mindless and purposeless processes "know" that error correction machinery was needed for DNA-based life to be viable? How the heck does blind, mindless and purposeless processes even care about errors? They are OK with making rocks! How do those processes even know about errors?
Someone hasn't thought this through.
+frankhuggins9733: Exactly. I totally agree with you, hence why I do not accept "abiogenesis" as "a solid fact." I would like to share my thoughts.
From what I have learned, DNA is very unstable by itself, and it is useless without something to give instructions to. Without the system already there, DNA will quickly begin to degrade, but not as quickly as RNA. I do not think that even with DNA and RNA present, a cell can form.
A cell is composed of multiple components to produce a complex structure. I think that when talking about "mindless and purposeless processes," the process of trying to create life would have expectedly failed every time because any error would ruin it, referring to mutations in genetic material outside of a whole system (cell). One problem I think there is in "abiogenesis" is the amount of time.
According to Wikipedia, "In bacterial cells, individual mRNAs can survive from seconds to more than an hour. However, the lifetime averages between 1 and 3 minutes, making bacterial mRNA much less stable than eukaryotic mRNA. In mammalian cells, mRNA lifetimes range from several minutes to days." So, in a mindless, primordial soup, I do not think there would be adequate time for all this material to gather. tRNA, as another example, is unstable in all conditions. RNA usually lasts no longer than a few days, and that is inside functioning, complete cells. Plus, what about the presence of molecules that would damage the genetic codes or cease the process entirely? Besides, molecules do not have minds and do not wait for certain molecules to react with them, they react with whatever they encounter. Plus, the chemicals necessary to produce DNA (guanine, cytosine, thymine, and adenine) are susceptible to oxidation and hydrolysis.
If we assume abiogenesis is possible, another problem for producing DNA-repairing mechanisms would be that the genetic information (RNA and DNA) would deteriorate long before this mechanism could be produced. The creation of such a mechanism would be far from simple, especially if we are talking about "mindless and purposeless processes." Since the RNA and DNA would degrade, oxidize, hydrolyze, or bond with "unwanted" molecules, there would be nothing to correct. And that is not even addressing the issue of how such a DNA-protecting tool would be formed. I think scientists present it as more simplistic than it actually is. To create such a complex mechanism that can _recognize errors in the DNA/RNA and understand how to repair them_ is a massive obstacle that not even leading scientists have resolved.
In a random clump of molecules, there is nothing to control what happens. No scientists are there to protect the genetic material from deterioration. In the Miller-Urey experiment, I think they got no further than just amino acids. They got nowhere close to creating life. My response to your valid inquiries is that these processes *_do not know_* errors and how to manage them. Again, in a random, mindless soup of chemicals, it just would not work.
"What makes the origin of life and of the genetic code a disturbing riddle is this: the genetic code is without any biological function unless it is translated: that is, unless it leads to the synthesis of the proteins whose structure is laid down by the code. But the machinery by which the cell translates the code consists of at least fifty macromolecular components which are themselves coded in the DNA. *Thus the code cannot be translated except by using certain products of its translation.* This constitutes a baffling circle; a really vicious circle, it seems, for any attempt to form a model or theory of the genesis of the genetic code. Thus we may be faced with the possibility that the origin of life (like the origin of physics) becomes an impenetrable barrier to science, and a residue to all attempts to reduce biology to chemistry and physics." -- Sir Karl Popper
"The scientific method does not allow us to exclude data which lead to the conclusion that the universe, life and man are based on design. To be forced to believe only one conclusion -- that everything in the universe happened by chance -- would violate the very objectivity of science itself." --Wernher von Braun
What would this 'designer' have designed? The first cell, the universe?
Does it just design something every few billion years then just leave it be?
The gap between such a designer and a god that is involved in human lives is even bigger than the gap between chemistry and biology.
It is absolutely amazing __________people stubbornly insist that origin of life had nothing to do with a creator!
Bullshit. People like Nick Lane study the chemistry, physics, thermodynamics involved in the origin of life. Robert Hazen studied mineral catalysis of biomolecules, Lee Cronin studies autocatalysis.....etc. There is no stubborness involved in these researchers or any of the others of whose work you've read nothing: Addy Pross, John Sutherland, Matthew Powner, Eric Smith, George Whitesides....
This is science. You can play with your invisible friends elsewhere.
The phrase "origin of life" may refer either to an event long ago, or it may also refer to a sequence of events that happen billions of times every single day ~ every day of every year.
A theory as to the latter is directly verifiable by every lay individual on this earth, hence of immeasurable practical advantage to every being (not only to humans, but even to animals).
But, sadly, what Nick and the entire science community target is the former.
Can Dr. Nick Lane take up Dr. James Tour's challenge for origin of life that he issued late August 2023? Dr. Lane would have 60 days to respond.
Why debate a delusional freak?
So the human body is an electronic energy processing machine. The brain is a bio-chemical computor. All of it is basically made of atoms in turn made of pure energy. Why energy wants to make life ? Id love to know.
Life is just an exothermal reaction:
Just letting off steam
So, emerging of information is no problem. You just take pattern of no-information sequence and repeat it to fulfill certain function (7:00-8:00). Are you serious??
If you have sufficient randomized RNA sequences then the codons make the bound proteins non-random. This inherently leads to selection *towards the prebiotic machinery* that he was talking about. What’s the problem?
@@nixedgaming you should first learn what is DNA information. TH-cam has a lot on it. 'DNA against evolution', and 'Intelligent design'
@@ievgeniipolozov3818 What do you mean by information? You haven't a clue, do you?
@@mcmanustony and do you know what is DNA and what its functions are? You haven't a clue, do you?
@@ievgeniipolozov3818 don’t be such an idiot.
Rather than making a fool of yourself sneering at the person asking the question, why not deal with the fact that you can’t answer it.
True.
I can certainly see life originating on the sea floor of a satellite like Europa. In fact the tidal core heating might produce vents on the sea floor like we have here on earth. A huge collision would be needed to free it like the elements in our periodic table and their numbers by neutron star collisions and probably not in a supernova. In fact life could have formed on earth just as easily at our hydrothermal vents. If when we get to another stellar system we find completely alien dna then it could form piecemeal.
Science fantasy at its best . . Should get an award for this brilliant story telling ; )
You must be very well versed in biochemistry to so categorically disiss this as fantasy. Please enlighten us all on where Dr. Lane's understanding fails and why.
@@spacelemur7955 - it is fantasy. Him knowing biochemistry doesn't magically make his fantasies into non-fantasies,
@@johnknight3529 Once again you dismiss him with a flick of a wrist. Thus, you must be profoundly well trained in the science. Please provide a _scientific_ rebuff, unless---of course---you are a scientifically ignorant religious troll. Which are you, Shinola or its infamous comparator?
He is very clear that it is speculation based on evidence.
That is still science - you make a hypothesis, research it, and try to prove or disprove it.
Why are you angry? What do you want him to do?
Far less credible examples of story telling out there. Religion, for example.
@@POWWOWMIK - "He is very clear that it is speculation based on evidence."
Like I said, it's Science fantasy.
"Why are you angry?
I'm not angry. Yer trippin' too. (Nothing award worthy I don't feel, mind you, just run of the mill projection/reality conflation it seems to me).
"What do you want him to do?"
Producing some sort of "protocell" in realityland would be a good start . . Never mind producing any sort of living cell, which is so far beyond anything these guys are even trying to do, despite now being able purchase any and all the component substances they want (harvested from actual cells), that they have to hawk "speculation based on evidence" with regard to purely hypothetic "protocells" as if a big deal. To keep the grant money flowing, and the worshipful public worshipping away, I suppose.
I guess eventually I'll be watching them hawking authoritative speculation about hypothetical pre-protocells they can't make or find either . . Sad state of affairs. (I'm saddened seeing this stuff, that's true)
Heard about a survey done out of a university (with an oversampling of college degreed respondents), that blew my mind, so to speak. . About two thirds believed scientists had already made single celled life in the laboratory. About one third believed they've also made "simple" animals, like amphibians and mollusk's.
Oh well, Siants (sounds like science ; ) slithers on, I guess . . Enjoy the show, he's a good one, best I've seen so far.
🎉❤❤❤
Given that whether you choose metabolism first or RNA World as your origin of life scenario, DNA arrives later. Was DNA invented by the developing life or was it discovered and found useful only later to take over the operation?
Also, given that there is a lot of information implicit in the chemistry preceding the arrival of DNA how did DNA go about gathering that information and encoding it for later use by itself and its descendants?
Finally, was the number of amino acids (twenty) fixed at the beginning or was the initial set smaller and did it grow to twenty and stop at that number by historical accident?
DNA is basically RNA: just a couple minor changes. DNA could evolve from RNA. The 2' hydroxyl group on ribose in an ribonucleotide gets deoxygenated (deoxyd) to produce a deoxyribonucleotide. That's most of the difference.
@@TonyTigerTonyTiger from the standpoint of chemistry RNA and DNA aren't two different things. Chemistry doesn't want or need either.
@@sentientflower7891 Uhm, what? In chemistry, RNA and DNA are two different things.
@@sentientflower7891 "from the standpoint of chemistry RNA and DNA aren't two different things. "
YOU treated them as 2 different things. You talked about an RNA world, then said DNA arrives later.
@@TonyTigerTonyTiger in biochemistry they are in different things, in chemistry neither exist anywhere throughout the entire Universe.
I'm seeing RNA and DNA more archival. Kind of like my tooling files on my 3D printer. I'm more busy using the stuff I've printed than I am compiling code. So, in cells most of the real action is actually happening outside the DNA and RNA. This is very exciting with vast implications for biotech and medicine. Hopefully we will get some good coding in the future instead of the half-ass mRNA vaccines that only code for fragments of the pathogen, with predictably crap results.
Ur mind Doc Is an amazing place, but, as a northerner I just wanted you to say bye gum, or ecky thump on lex fridman's pc😂 thanx for firing my synapses for me, ta Doc. M🤟
The KGB and CCP watching the CCTV
NOT CLUELESS!!😂
PLEASE YELL LOUDER I CANT HEAR YOUR FOR JAMES IS SPEAKING
@@johannessievers6759 James who?
@@mcmanustony what?
@@johannessievers6759 you said: James is speaking. I asked James who?
Do you indeed disbelieve in He who created the earth in two days and attribute to Him equals? That is the Lord of the worlds."
He placed on it firmly set mountains over its surface, and He blessed it and determined therein its [creatures'] sustenance in four days without distinction - for [the information] of those who ask.
Then He directed Himself to the heaven while it was smoke and said to it and to the earth, 'Come [into being], willingly or by compulsion.' They said, 'We have come willingly.'
And He completed them as seven heavens within two days and inspired in each heaven its command. And We adorned the nearest heaven with lamps and as protection. That is the determination of the Exalted in Might, the Knowing."
None of this is in the Bible. Oh dear.
The difference between science and religion is that you don't have to create an entire separate mythos to make science sound feasible......discuss haha eres to u Doc, ta
If you scientifically analyzed his discription of a random RNA string psychologically , he seemed to rush through that bit? Was he feeling a little guilty perhaps.
There is no scientific way to analyse something psychologically.
Psychology is a science and uses empirical evidence and careful observation. Universities all describe it as a science. It may be more complicated than that but that’s the short answer.
@@rodneynewburn545 psychology might arguably be a science, but not one that can determine the intention behind someone's words with any more accuracy than an averagely perceptive person's intuition.
Everyone needs to stop paying their psychologist then.
@@rodneynewburn545 not necessarily. One can have great insight and offer great advice without being a scientist, or the advice having any scientific basis.
Look, there is no evidence here. For you who maybe taken in , he’s treating you as fools.
Your favorite pastor certainly is.
I assume you are CONvinced you are utterly right! I presume you are unable to emotionally accept otherwise.
@@rodneynewburn545your failure to identify where anything is actually wrong in the presentation is noted.
@@rodneynewburn545And still we wait …
He says ,”we will never know how life started” . What is complicated about that! The rest is supposition based on the bios of his own beliefs. The Big Bang is still! A theory . What caused it and what was ther before it etc.
"Um" is not a word, neither is "Ah".
They are actually both words.
this subject is very interesting. unfortunately this professor has no the gift to make it sound interesting...