Nick Lane Quotes

This book will explore how the flow of energy and matter structures the evolution of life and even genetic information.

In bacteria, the DNA forms into a long and twisted loop. The contorted tracks... close... to form a singular circular . In eukaryotic cells, there are usually a number of different chromosomes... each has two separate ends.

That's why they [viruses] are not in the tree of life. They don't relate in a very direct way. ...[T]he tree of life now is not only about ribosomes. You can build trees from whole genomes, but viral genomes? They don't really fit in, in a way which makes sense to people.

[N]o bacteria coat their DNA with s: their DNA is naked. The histones not only protect eukaryotic DNA from chemical attack, but also guard access to the genes.

Now, if we get to complex life and we get beyond organic life forms into artificial intelligence, post-biological, then anything goes and maybe that's what we should be looking for.

The possessors of... nuclei, the s, are the most important cells in the world. ...[A]ll plants and animals, all and fungi... essentially everything we can see with the naked eye, is composed of [them]...

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.

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.

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.)

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.

Flux is a form of flow, but with one crucial difference. ...In biochemistry flux is the flow of things that are transformed along the way.

One is pretty much the same as another stromatolite, to my eye. That probably gets the stromatolite biologists in a fury, I suspect...

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

I've had long and sometimes difficult discussions, especially about the singularity of the origin of Eukaryotes... A lot of people don't like that. ...[I]t's not really about what does it say about the probability of life elsewhere, although it has things to say to that. It's really about life on earth, and a lot of people are very uncomfortable with the idea of improbability... I've had quite difficult discussions with some students about that, but rarely... about life elsewhere in the Universe.

That's a question about the meaning of life... Why are we here? What are we doing? What's important to us? Why should we struggle to do anything, and I think most of the answers to those questions lie within society itself. ...I don't see a greater meaning, that we've been put here as a species, that we're exceptional in any way. We're just another species. We're very much similar to pretty much everything else, and I think what we've done that's good has been the achievement of society as a whole... [A] lot of people within society... humans have a need for an origins myth, and that origins myth, if it happens to bear some semblance to reality, I think a lot of people are genuinely interested to know what can we say about the origins of the Universe, about the origins of the solar system, about the origins of life. ...[C]an we as ...puny-brained humans come to, through logic, through experiments, through thinking about it, through observations, come to an explanation for how life came to be. It's a grand question. It would be wonderful to know the answer. I think a lot of people would love to know that answer, and I personally would love to know that answer, even if my own views on the subject turn out to be completely wrong.