Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast #318

Nick Lane is a biochemist at UCL and author of Transformer, The Vital Question, and many other amazing books on biology, chemistry, and life. Thank you for listening ❤ Check out our sponsors: https://lexfridman.com/sponsors/ep318-sb See below for timestamps, transcript, and to give feedback, submit

well the source of energy at the origin of life is the reaction between carbon dioxide and hydrogen and amazingly most of these reactions are exergonic which is to say they release energy this if you have hydrogen and co2 and you put them together in a falcon tube and you warm it up to say 50 degrees centigrade and you put in a couple of catalysts and you shake it nothing’s gonna happen but thermodynamically that is less stable two gases hydrogen and co2 is less stable than cells what should happen is you get cells coming out why doesn’t that happen is because of the kinetic barriers it’s because that’s where you need the spark the following is a conversation with nick lane a biochemist at university college london and author of some of my favorite books on biology science and life ever written including his two most recent titled transformer the deep chemistry of life and death and the vital question why is life the way it is this is the lex friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here’s nick lane let’s start with perhaps the most mysterious the most interesting question that uh we little humans can ask of ourselves how did life originate on earth you could you could ask anybody working on the subject and you’ll get a different answer from all of them they will be pretty passionately held opinions and their opinions grounded in science um but they’re still really at this point their opinions because there’s so much stuff to know that all we can ever do is get a kind of a small slice of it and it’s the context which matters so i can give you my answer my answer is from a biologist’s point of view that has been missing from the equation over decades which is well what does life do on earth what what why is it this way why is it made of cells why is it made of carbon why does it why is it powered by electrical charges on membranes there’s all these interesting questions about cells that if you then look to see well is there an environment on earth on the early earth four billion years ago it kind of matches the requirements of cells well there is one there’s a very obvious one it’s basically created by whenever you have a wet rocky planet you get these hydrothermal vents which generate hydrogen gas in bucket loads and electrical charges on kind of cell-like pores that can can drive the kind of chemistry that life does so it seems so beautiful and so so obvious um that i’ve spent the last 10 years or more trying to do experiments it turns out to be difficult of course everything’s more difficult than you ever thought it was going to be but it looks i would say more true rather than less true over that 10-year period i think i have to take a step back every now and then and think hang on a minute where’s this going uh i’m happy it’s going in a sensible direction and i think then you have these other interesting dilemmas i mean i’m often accused of being too focused on life on earth too kind of narrow-minded and inward looking you might say i’m think i’m talking about carbon i’m talking about cells and maybe you or plenty of people can say to me ah yeah but life can be anything i have no imagination and maybe they’re right but unless we can say why life here is this way and if those reasons are fundamental reasons or if they’re just trivial reasons then we can’t answer that question um so so i think they’re fundamental reasons and i think we need to worry about them yeah there might be some deep truth to the puzzle here on earth that will resonate with other puzzles elsewhere that will solving this particular puzzle will give us that deeper truth so what to this puzzle you said vents hydrogen wet so chemically what is the potion here how important is oxygen you wrote a book about this yeah and i actually just came straight here from a conference where i was sharing a session on whether oxygen matters or not in the history of life of course it matters but it matters most of the origin of life to be not there um as i see it we have this i mean life is made of carbon basically primarily um organic molecules with carbon-carbon bonds and the building block the lego brick that we take out of the air or take out of the oceans is carbon dioxide and to turn carbon dioxide into organic molecules we need to strap on hydrogen and so we need an and this is basically what life is doing it’s hydrogenating carbon dioxide it’s taking the hydrogen the bubbles out of the earth in these hydrothermal vents and it sticks it on co2 um and it’s kind of really as simple as that um and actually thermodynamically there’s the the thing that i find most troubling is that you if you do these experiments in the lab the molecules you get are exactly the molecules that we see at the heart of biochemistry in the heart of life is there something to be said about the earliest origins of that little uh potion that chemical process what really is the spark there there isn’t a spark um there is a continuous chemical reaction and there is kind of a spark but it’s a continuous electrical charge which helps drive that reaction so literally spark uh well the charge at least but yes i mean a spark in that sense is um we’re we tend to think of in terms of frankenstein we tend to think in terms of electricity and one one moment you zap something and it comes alive and what does that really mean you’ve it’s come alive and now what’s sustaining it well we are sustained by oxygen by this continuous chemical reaction and if you put a plastic bag on your head then you’ve got a minute or something before it’s all over so some way of being able to leverage a source of energy well the source of energy at the origin of life is the reaction between carbon dioxide and hydrogen and amazingly most of these reactions are exergonic which is to say they release energy this if you have hydrogen and co2 and you put them together in a falcon tube and you warm it up to say 50 degrees centigrade and you put in a couple of catalysts and you shake it nothing’s gonna happen but thermodynamically that is less stable two gases hydrogen and co2 is less stable than cells what should happen is you get cells coming out um so why doesn’t that happen is because of the kinetic barriers is because that’s where you need the spark is it possible that life originated multiple times on earth the way you describe it you make it sound so easy there’s a long distance to go from the first bits of prebiotic chemistry to say molecular machines like ribosomes is that the first thing that you would say is life like if i introduce you to the two of you at a party you would say that’s a living thing i would say as soon as we introduce genes information into systems that are growing anyway so i i would i would talk about growing protocells as soon as we in introduce even random bits of information into into there i’m thinking about rna molecules for example it doesn’t have to have any information it can be completely random sequence but if it’s introduced into a system which is in any case growing and doubling itself and reproducing itself then any changes in that sequence that allow it to do so better or worse are now selected by perfectly normal natural selection but the system so that’s when it becomes alive to my mind that’s encompassed into like um an object that keeps information and involves that information over time or changes that information over time yes exactly in response to that so it’s always part of a cell system from the very beginning so is your sense that it started only