Nick Lane Quotes

Whether you define life as living or not is really a matter of opinion... It's a continuum. You can draw a line wherever you want or healthier not to draw a line at all... I think there has to be some form of an environment capable of giving rise to some form of , which is capable of giving rise to nucleotides. ...They would put me in the metabolism first camp, but I dislike the tag... because I think it's simply about... the line across a continuum...

Life as we know it has both, and the people who say s first are in effect saying, "Well, there's plenty of s, there's plenty of RNA. The environment's providing it for free," without worrying themselves too much about what kind of an environment is going to provide all of that for free, and by definition, an environment which is effectively metabolically sophisticated enough to provide s is non-living and therefore not part of the question, so they're just pushing it aside. I would say that the whole metabolic side is needed to give rise to genetic information and nucleotides in an RNA world in the first place, that it would be a dirty RNA world contaminated with s and s, and s and things...

[W]hy is metabolism structured this way? There has to be thermodynamic underpinnings for it, otherwise it wouldn't happen. It had to have arisen in the absence of genes... in my mind and therefore there must be environments which are favoring protocells with this kind of metabolism, making copies of themselves... In my mind they have to get better at it, otherwise RNA is just never going to appear.

I read some of those ideas years ago, , and thought it was thrilling. Over recent years I don't really see the need for a kind of genetic intermediary between an RNA level of genetic replication and some other form of replicator. ...[T]here's no suggestion that it's there in biology. There's no suggestion that I know from geology that is capable of giving rise to more complex systems, or to having an organic takeover. It seems to add in a layer of unnecessary complexity. So I much prefer to get straight into organic chemistry, and straight into as we know it.

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?

s of some sort [lie between a hydrothermal vent system and a virus] in my mind. The trouble with viruses is that they do need a sophisticated environment to make copies of themselves. Same with selfish jumping genes, transposable elements and so on. They need to be in an environment where they can take advantage of something which is converting the environment into copies of themselves, and there's a rule... This is changing with the discovery of all these es, but as a rule you need some form of to convert the environment into copies of yourself.

Viruses are quite sophisticated in the sense that they're forming virion particles and they're infecting other cells... s and things... selfish genes, I suppose in the broadest sense.

Yes I do think that... [viruses] are alive, not for the obvious reasons. ...I was invited to do some filming with the BBC... it was about cells, but they'd been asked to tell a story... about the viral infection of a cell, and I said, "Well I don't know anything about viruses," and they said "No, we just want to know a little bit about early evolution," and I said, "Great, I can talk about early evolution in cells, but I can't really talk about viruses." ...[T]hey said "OK, no problem," and they flew me out to Iceland to some black sand beach that I think had been used in some science fiction movie, and they said "Right, so Nick, what can you tell us about how viruses... drove the early evolution of life?" and I said, "Oh God, guys, come on!" and they said, "No, this is a film about viruses." So I had to think quickly... What I found myself saying was that viruses were parasitic on their environment and can afford to be very simple because their environment is very rich. They live inside cells. Everything that they need is provided for them, but plants are parasitic on their environment. They still need CO₂. They still need water. They still need light. ...I wouldn't hesitate to call it <nowiki>[</nowiki>parasitism] a definition of life... [L]ife as a rule is parasitic on its environment, and the level of parasitism depends on the sophistication of the environment. So in that sense viruses use the richness of their local environment to make copies of themselves and they behave with the kind of low cunning that's characteristic of life. So I think of them as alive, yes.

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.

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.

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.

It could be any of those <nowiki>[</nowiki>sodium, or other ion gradients]. The fact of life on earth is that it tends to use proton gradients, and we know particular environments that do use proton gradients, and the reason I think protons is because , which is to say the proton concentration, can modulate the reactivity of both and . Now sodium concentrations wouldn't do that, but protons, if you've got gas in alkaline fluids, hydrothermal fluids... what you've got coming out of these s, hydrogen is more reactive in alkaline conditions. It really doesn't want to push its electrons onto something else, but if it's in alkaline conditions it pushes its electrons onto something else, and the protons are left behind and they will react immediately with the hydroxide ions to form water, which is thermodynamically very favored, and so it's far more likely to push its electrons onto CO₂ if it's in alkaline solution.

I deliberately avoid having... [a working definition of life]. What I quote... is... from Peter Mitchell... a pioneer... of... , that essentially all cells, with very very few exceptions, are powered by... proton gradients across the membrane. So on one side of the membrane surrounding the cell you've got the high concentration on the inside, a low proton concentration [on the outside]. Protons are... the positively charged nuclei of atoms, so... [y]ou're pumping them out and... putting a charge on the membrane... That's as universally conserved across life on earth as the itself, which implies, as a mechanism, it's very early... [I]t's not something anyone ever predicted. It's not something that... emerges from a chemical understanding of the biochemistry of cells.

[Life is] a continuum. I think there are some phase transitions, probably, and the origin of... genetic information is probably one of them. ...[W]e are doing some modeling work to try and work out how evolvable... a geological system [can] be along the path to getting to cell-like things that... most people would understand as life. How far can you go down that line before you have genetic inheritance? ...[A] long way, but you get to a point where... it's no longer evolvable. ...[I]n our modeling, you can get to a point where you're capable of producing s capable of making copies of themselves with a degree of sophistication, but getting beyond that, to specializing to different niches and so on, I don't see the way, without genetic inheritance.

What does life do then? ...it seems reasonable that the earliest forms of life were ic... [i.e.,] they grew from gases... found in normal geological environments through an energy flux which is equivalent to cells which we see today, which is to say, what all life does today. There's a very simple phrase from Mike Russell... "hydrogenate CO₂"... [i.e.,] add onto to make organic molecules. That is the structure of in cells, and different cells can get hydrogen from all kinds places. They can strip it out of water. They can get it from , but it also comes bubbling out of the ground as hydrogen gas, and that seems to be the simplest form of life imaginable as... life on earth. It's reacting hydrogen and CO₂, and they don't react easily. The way that cells make them react... is to effectively use an electrical charge on a ... [T]here are environments like deep sea s that provide... for free with an equivalent electrical charge across a barrier, and I think... that's the way to see the question.