Nick Lane Quotes

[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.

We also have a power to destroy the earth, and... it's probably unique. ...Destroy ourselves, destroy a large part of life in earth, not the bacteria... If we take ourselves out, we'll give it five million years and it will be indistinguishable, apart from ourselves.

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

Mitochondria are a badly kept secret. ...There are usually hudreds or thousands of them in a single cell, where they use oxygen to burn up food. ...[O]ne billion ...would fit comfortably on a grain of sand.

[On the controversy between and .] [T]he classic case of convergence would be the eye and the human eye, or ian eyes. ...The common ancestor they had had a light sensitive spot, they did have some regulatory genes in common... for example, but that had to effectively independently recruit all the rest of the genes required to make a camera type eye, and that direction of evolutionary travel was in parallel. It was convergent. We even see in some s... a camera-type eye in single-celled critters where there's a retina made from s. There's a made from mitochondria. There's a there. They don't have a brain. I don't know how they use this thing but... plainly it's a camera-type eye. ...It's a of some sort. ...I would see that as a completely independent origin of a camera-type eye, albeit without a brain. I would see the octopus' and mammalian eye as being convergence in the Simon Conway Morris sense... There are certain ways that you can make an eye, that work, and all the steps along the way have to be favored, and... perhaps there are seven or eight... fundamentally different types of eye that we see on earth, and most of them have arisen more than once, always from a common ancestor, generally, that had as a light sensitive pigment. So you're then into an interesting terrain or... How common are the right types of light sensitive pigment? They're chemically not so straight forward.

It's interesting... that life as a rule does not use UV radiation as an energy source, and the kind of chemistry that's being done using it doesn't resemble biochemistry as I know it... [T]he kind of environment that I'm talking about is deep sea s, and the question is, "Well, does it have to be deep sea? Could it... be same systems on land?" and they exist on land. They perfectly could. So it's perfectly feasible.

We all share this basic machinery in cells, and it's not related to whether you're photosynthetic or whether you're phagocytes or whether you are a fungus or whether you're an animal cell. We all share the same machinery. Why? The possibility is that it's not about adaptation to the external world, it's about adaptation to these s. These pesky bacteria that went on to become a mitochondria. Maybe this conflict of interest... [that] had to be resolved somehow was what was driving a lot the elaboration of cellular machinery. It's a kind of local... intimate conflict.

From around the mid 1990s, researchers discovered that is... governed... by the mitochondria. ...[T]he failure to commit apoptosis is the root cause of cancer. ...In cancer, individual cells bid for freedom ...Without , the bonds that bind cells in complex s might never have ebvolved.

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.

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...

[L]ife will probably get stuck in a bacterial rut elsewhere in the universe... we might not be alone, but will almost certainly be lonely.

To me it [we] means life as a whole, so I would include bacteria in we. ...Life on earth is a whole, yes I think so. We share the . We share the same cell structures. I feel quite a strong fellow feeling with bacteria.

It requires that life elsewhere should be modeled along similar lines to life here, which is that it should be cellular, it should be carbon-based. It should be in water. If those things are not true, then there's no reason why that numbers game would apply anywhere else. But if those things are true, then yes, I think the fact that photosynthesis only arose once, that Eucaryotes only arose once, that what Nick [Nicholas J.] Butterfield calls organ grade multicellularity, which is to say quite serious differentiation with scores of different cell types and specializations. We don't see that in fungi. We don't see that in algae. ...[Y]ou see two or three different types of cell. So that's rare. It's in plants and it's in animals. It begins to look less likely. I think it's reasonable to say it's less likely, but I wouldn't like to rely too much or put too much weight on it.

Now CO₂ itself... doesn't really want to pick up any electrons and become reduced to an organic molecule, but if it's in a relatively ic environment where there's s available, it picks up a negative charge. It doesn't want another negative charge. It's going to try and repel that, but if there's a proton around, it picks up the proton. Now it's neutralized the charges... pick up another electron, another proton. So it's much easier to accept electrons in an acidic environment. And this is the structure of these vents and it's the structure of cells, and it's how these earliest, most ancient cells we know about actually do fix CO₂. They use the proton channel in the , which effectively locally acidifies an environment and allows this reaction to proceed. So I think that's fundamental, simple... works well, and it's testable in the lab.

We've had some success and quite a lot of failure too. ...[T]he problem we're having... is reproducing the successes we have had. The big problem... for anyone working on this is that hydrogen gas is not soluble in water at atmospheric pressure. What we really need to do to make this work is to ramp up the pressure in the system to 300 bars and then we need a continuous flow. For this to work you need a across a barrier. Then it should work. We don't know, and we haven't got the funding to build a high pressure reactor. We're collaborating with a group in Utrecht to do that. ...If we can do that experiment and then it fails, then my confidence that this would be a suitable possible origin of life would take a serious knock.