Nick Lane Quotes

If the Krebs cycle is ordained by thermodynamics, then it should take place spontaneously in some suitably propitious envirnonment, even in the absence of s.

Whether or not it would be possible to drive the kind of protein machinery that you see in modern cells, like an ... that makes the energy currency of life... If it were just sitting there in a in a vent, can work out whether the natural... ion gradients in these vents would be... powerful enough to drive this machine to work. ...[Y]ou need to know what are the substrates, what are... the materials that it needs to operate? Where are they coming from? What's the concentration of them? You realize that you have no answer to any of those, and then what's the product? Well, it disappears off somewhere else, as well. So how can selection act if you've got stuff coming in from some unknown place and the product leaving to some unknown place? It made me realize that cellularization is important as a way of keeping the inside in and in keeping the outside out, and so I now have problems with the idea of seeing the entire vent as a kind of a living system.

The sequence of letters in a specifies the sequence of s in a protein. If the sequence of letters is changed—a ''—this may change the structure of the protein (...not always, there is some redundancy... technically degeneracy..—several combinations... can code for the same amino acid.)

I think we share consciousness right across... not just even the animal world. I would see it going down even to the level of cells, some kind of flickering of consciousness. So I don't feel alone on earth, but I do think that there is something different about humans.

I've been asked on various occasions, "Why don't we, as an origins of life community, get together, think what a killer experiment is, and then go and build a or something, where we go and do the experiment?" And the answer to that is... [W]e can't agree with each other about what experiment would you do? ...[I]t is intrinsically a lot more complex, precisely because it's a continuum. We don't know. We don't agree about what environment, we don't agree about what kind of chemistry or biochemistry. We can't join these things up, and so it seems to me a much healthier environment is to be deliberately multiple about it. Not to say, "Ok, this particular world view is going to dominate." I think we have to have multiple views until we know more.

[A]cquiring mitochondria gives you a headache that can go wrong very easily, but here's an interesting problem in a nutshell. You look at a plant cell under a microscope, or an animal cell, or a fungal cell, or an or something, and you'll recognize the same structure in all of them. They've all got a nucleus. They've all got the s as straight chromosomes. They've all got s. They've all got s. They've all got complexes. They all do as a division mechanism. They all do as two steps where you first double everything and then half it twice. They all go through the same rigmarole. They've all got mitochondria. They've all got the same system, endoplasmic reticulum, things like that. ...[Y]ou could list page after page after page in a text book and it would be exactly the same for a plant, or a fungal cell, or an animal cell. Now they have really different ways of life. If you were to simply think, "Well, there's some inevitability that bacteria will give rise to complex life." ...You would imagine that a photosynthetic bacteria, a would give rise directly to photosynthetic , eukaryotic algae, but they didn't. It was by the intermediary of acquisition of a . There was a common ancestor of eukaryotes that was nothing like a cyanobacterium and nothing... quite like an algae except without the chloroplasts. So... why is it that we all have the same machinery inside, but we have such different lifestyles? Why don't we see multiple origins of complex life where cyanobacteria give rise to photosynthetic trees? Why don't we see predatory bacteria?

Different species have transferred different genes to the nucleus, but all species with mitochondria have... retained... the same core contingent of mitochondrial genes.

Now it's possible to have some kind of protocell with some form of metabolism without any genetic heredity. It's possible in principle. Is it alive?

[M]ost of what I teach and interact with the students is more about life on earth and the principles governing evolution, and from my own point of view, the biochemical side, which is not normally part of the evolutionary biology... [I]t's relatively rare for me to discuss life elsewhere in the Universe with them.

There are people at UCL, Ian Crawford, who's doing a great deal for , but it's not something which is happening through my department. It's happening through s. It's not happening in biological sciences...

[W]e are biochemically quite simple in comparison bacteria. Simpler than bacteria. In terms of our metabolic biochemistry we are really limited. ...[W]e have ...across the entire domain of s, about the same degree of metabolic sophistication as a single bacterial cell.

[A]fter a decade of careful , it looks as if all known eukaryotic cells either have or once had... mitochondria.

The information encoded in DNA spells out the molecular structure of s. This, said Crick, is the 'central dogma' of all biology: genes code for proteins.

The is riddled with redundancy.

[I]t's interesting to me that the bacteriophages, the viruses that you find in bacteria, are not remotely similar to the ones that you find infecting archaea, which again are not remotely similar to eukaryotic viruses. ...They're different in their appearance. They're different in their mechanisms in which they force their... I mean the bacteriophages are these classic lunar module landing things... They are stunning things to look at. ...Some es look like bottle balls or postage stamps, strange shapes... They don't have any genes in common. They don't have mechanisms of entry into cells in common. They appear to be independently derived.