Scientist Stories: Jack Szostak, The Origin of Life Not as Hard as it Looks
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 16 ธ.ค. 2024
- Jack Szostak is a University Professor of chemistry at the University of Chicago.
Jack Szostak wants to understand the chemical and physical processes that facilitated the origin and early evolution of life on Earth. To explore these processes, Szostak and his team are trying to build a model of a primitive cell, or protocell, that has the minimum capabilities to self-replicate and evolve. Through their work, they hope to gain insight into some of the universal properties of modern cells, and how modern cells arose from their simpler ancestors. They are also on the lookout for chemical or physical phenomena that might have practical utility in biomedical research.
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An excellent review of the topic
Hello, you should state that this video was taken without permission from the School of Molecular Sciences at Arizona State University TH-cam Channel
Do you have any evidence for this claim of yours? How do you account for the fact that this video was not taken down?
@@peternyikos8020 I am the faculty member in the ASU School of Molecular Sciences responsible for social media, my colleague made this recording at ASU and posted it on the ASU SMS TH-cam channel soon after it was recorded, 2 months before this posting, I know nothing about the process whereby videos are taken down: th-cam.com/video/ZLzyco3Q_Rg/w-d-xo.html
When two macromolecules fall in live…
I want to see a dialogue between Szostak and Tour.
Tour is right, will Szostak admit, that we still don't know in all the details how life evolved 'from rocks'.
But as he shows in this video: the gaps become smaller and smaller and there is only room left for a tiny 'god of the gaps'.
But: Tour never engages in a -real- dialogue, that's a dream.
@@AdrieKooijman You may have made the TH-cam Understatement of the Year with:
"we still don't know in all the details how life evolved 'from rocks'."
The truth is, we have no idea of even 0.1% of any details of how life MIGHT have evolved `from rocks.' That's the bottom line, since we may never have more than a minuscule amount of data as to how it DID evolve.
I guess I didn't say enough with my comment of two days ago about why a much better title would have been, "A Few Isolated Steps in the Origin of Life Are Not as Hard as they Look." After all, you make it look like there are only a few isolated steps where the origin of life looks especially hard, with:
"But as he shows in this video: the gaps become smaller and smaller and there is only room left for a tiny 'god of the gaps'."
Szostak shows no such thing, and I see I need to make a lot more comments before this sinks in. I'll make more than one today, starting in less than an hour, if my internet connection holds.
I've seen very little of Tour so far. How good is he at the biochemistry behind the probable steps leading to the first prokaryotes [bacteria and archae] from basic building blocks like the amino acids and nucleotides that have been produced in labs that simulate very early earth conditions?
Szostak certainly has the biochemical knowledge, but he is still groping for some of the probable steps and shows no sign of being able explain how OUR genetic code evolved, nor the protein translation mechanism that is totally dependent on there being SOME genetic code.
@@peternyikos8020 To 'replay' natural development of life we need an empty planet and a billion years or so. What else than showing some of the principles working can you expect in a few decades of lab studies? Self assembly, increasing complexity, replication and spontaneous modification are some of the core principles that have been demonstrated in lab settings and simulations. True, there is a lot more, but no 'show-stoppers' as far as I can see.
My comment on the god of the gaps was meant more general: gods (or devils) used to be responsible for thunder and lightning, the rainbow, failed and succeeded crops, diseases, creation of all animals and plants (including the over 99% that are extinct) and much, much more things that all have been explained by science beyond reasonable doubt by now. Gods still may have been involved in igniting the big-bang and putting the spark of life in the first living cells but that's about it, unless dark matter and dark energy turn out to be god driven. From that perspective it's really a few small gaps.
@@AdrieKooijman "Showing general principles working" is a pathetically poor substitute for what this video is aimed at, as told by its ambitious title. I have often used the metaphor of a 100 floor skyscraper for the origin of life as we know it, with the first free-living prokaryotes (bacteria or archae) on the roof. I place the prebiotic result of the Miller-Urey experiment in the basement, the complete list of amino acids used by life as we know it on the first floor, and the five nucleotides of life as we know it on the second floor.
Very little is known about the upper floors, beyond the need for ribozymes to replicate RNA and DNA, and for transcribing RNA into DNA and vice versa, and for evolving our genetic code and our protein translation mechanism. But we have no clue as to how these could have arisen originally.
The best that is done in this video is with lipid vesicles, between the 46:10 point and the 47:40 point. The necessary lipids themselves I would put on the second floor, but once they are there, they quickly ascend to the 10th floor to form the lipid vesicles with multiple membrane layers, dividing and coalescing as shown.
Unfortunately, having outrun the other necessities, they are stuck on the 10th floor until the necessities (and not just ions or useless garbage) make their way up there. By necessities, I mean useful biomolecules that they can incorporate, including some that enable them to metabolize others that they can incorporate.
I saw Szostak say in a video that the first living cell has to have a genome, form of metabolism and a phospholipid membrane, all must be created at the same time. Said they have no clue how this could be possible.
The first truly *living* cell. Not the first protocell
@@APRENDERDESENHANDO Proto cell is a made up word. No evidence it ever existed, but doesn’t matter anyway because you still have to get to a living cell and that requires all of the parts at the same time. Clueless.
@@edgein8632 Of course you're clueless, if you've never looked into the actual research 😉
@@edgein8632 I see you can do James Tour....can you do others? Jimmy Cagney? Christopher Walken?
@@edgein8632"They needed to get X"
"They got the engredients for X"
"That doesn't exist >:( "
An extremely difficult topic that requires years of tuition to understand covered in one lecture? Impossible. Hundreds of questions to answer and details to learn.
A new book published by Austin Macauley Publishers titled From Chemistry to Life on Earth outlines abiogenesis in great detail with a solution to the evolution of the genetic code and the ribosome as well as the cell in general using 290 references, 50 illustrations and several information tables with a proposed molecular natural selection formula with a worked example for ATP. Cheap as an e book.
Tuition?
@@stephencwinans Call it study and guidance from someone who has a thorough scenario.
A MUCH better title would have been, "A Few Isolated Steps in the Origin of Life Are Not as Hard as they Look." This is especially evident in the 35 minute Q&A session in the end, as one sees to how much ignorance about some key steps Szostak confesses.
In one answer, he just talked about the current way in which proteins are produced rather taking the opportunity to talk about how that complicated, yet beautifully interactive mechanism could possibly have arisen. This is one of the hardest series of steps on the way to life as we know it. [The questioner starts at about 1:06 and the answer ends about 1:06:40.]
Wow…this is the best there is in OL? So many unanswered questions
At one point in the film, between the ca. 13:00 minute point and the ca. 13:50 point, Szostak completely abandons the project of trying to re-create prebiotic conditiions or simulating something like natural selection. Instead, he talks about an unspecified number of "generations" of RNA molecules in the laboratory, in which the human experimenters carefully select the mutants that are in the direction of "molecules that do uh what we want okay."
The "what we want" is to bind an ATP molecule, but they are still working on how to bind more tightly to this quite simple molecule.
Human selection like this was well known before Darwin came along and showed how SOME of it could be done (much more slowly!) via natural selection. But Szostak's method is like Intelligent Design not only because it is a human selection process, but because there was a specific goal in mind. The idea of physical processes having a specific direction was abandoned over a century before Szostak's experiment.
PS I'm surprised no one in the audience quizzed Szostak about this failure to simulate natural processes [except perhaps random mutation]. I hope the lecture he gave to the professional audience the next day will eventually be shown to the public. I'd be very disappointed if the professionals didn't pick up on this issue.
"Almost solved".
However, Life is Not inherent in mechanistic ⚛️ atoms and lifeless molecules.
And how would you 100% know if atoms and molecules are lifeless? What if they are alive in a different sense?
@@pulsar22 ⚛️ atoms and lifeless molecules are not alive, because materialistic scientists can Not create a living organism from the aforementioned.
Patterns by mechanistic atoms does not equate to Living, just inherent directions.
@@steveflorida8699Life is also lifeless and not alive. Biochemistry is just chemistry. Nobody is arguing that life is anything different than atoms.
@@chaotickreg7024 living organism are alive. Even Chaotic Kreg is alive to respond with dialogue.
Therefore, your statement "life is also lifeless" is unfounded and unscientific/philosophical dribble.
@@steveflorida8699 Life is responsive, sure. But what is life? Is life response? Maybe responsive things live, therefore responsiveness exists but aliveness is just a trait of responsive things. Do you see the false reasoning going on here? At the end of the day, "life" and "living" are descriptors and are not actually nouns. They don't exist. They describe matter which we find interesting, but life as a material thing makes no sense. Life is a property of chemistry. "Organic chemistry" is basically any chemistry that uses carbon because that's all life is, carbon chemistry.
Don't get me wrong. Humans are awesome! Never accuse me of devaluing life! But don't you dare say nature or chemistry aren't complex enough to make us. Elevating us to supernatural magical beings is silly. Life does not exist as a thing. Life is a trait of things, just things, just (really really cool) natural objects, that's all we are and you should have the humility to confront that reality.
It's heartbreaking to see how James Tour accidently destroyed this man's reputation and, I would say, influence. I don't gloat over this, for if Jack hadn't been arrogant and sloppy in his attitude towards his Creator's creation 15 years ago, he wouldn't have been humbled like this.
I've been wondering lately how a single cell mutated into a living being capable of breeding. Is there a theory now that two developed over time, and the trillions of cells in each knew that they needed to design themselves to accommodate males and females?
You don’t have to wonder any more, it’s been observed. Look into it.
James Tour destroyed hos own reputation by screaming lies and abuse at Szostak in Texas to an audience of pig ignorant, scientifically illiterate morons.
" I don't gloat over this,"- no you lie that it actually occurred. It didn't and you know damn well it didn't.
Hmmm . . . Enormous number of question. . .
The best part of the video is that it only has 1.2k views at the time of this comment. I am pretty sure you know what you are presenting can not be or has ever been confirmed by any conclusive scientific study. You are dealing in well spoken "What If" and not facts. Using the words "simple" or "basic" to describe biological existence is your tactic to inject the assumption that you have a greater knowledge of how things works or maybe even how they came to be. The best you can do is observe what was made and attempt to extrapolate. Your problem nothing you find fits into your preconceived ideas. That is why you have to defer to exo-planets or implying that DNA has unused parts. You know that both are untrue but you are desperate it appears. Maybe Harvard is trying to clean up it`s act.
You are a fool, we are not specially trained experts working in origins of life research. We can't understand the concepts because we lack the pre-requisite knowledge necessary. No matter where origins of life research goes neither you or I have any ability to speak about it in a coherent way. Perhaps instead of leaving comments that show your ignorance, crack open a science book and learn something. If you really think you know more about this subject than a nobel prize winner, I pity you.
@@megatron6988I suggest you get an education……he’s 100% correct. Szostak is only telling a story with no evidence.
No, he isn't correct and Szostak isn't "telling a story" he is trying to explain some aspects of his research to a regular audience. These concepts are too complex for regular people like you and I to understand without specialized training. I pity you as well.
At the end of the day Dr. Szostak doesn't need me defending him or his work. The science he does and nobel prize he won speaks for itself. He will never see any of these comments partially because this is a repost from a different channel and partially because he is a real scientist with better things to do. I also have better things to do and I'm going to get back to doing them now. Cheers.
@@megatron6988 I’m not regular people…..he is telling a story with no evidence. His Nobel Prize was not Origin of life.
@megatron6988 being aloft doesn't grant insight... but it does make one crass...
An insult doesn't prove your point or his. Calling a biological function simple is wrong.
Nobel prizes aren't worth anything if the science is wrong.
You are wrong.