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… - Nick Lane

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.

A single discovery tomorrow could disprove everything I'm saying now. That's quite thrilling. ...We have been looking for several hundred years since Leeuwenhoek and we've not found anything really shocking that falls out of the system.

[T]he mechanism by which mitochondria generate energy, by pumping protons across a membrane (), is found in all forms of life... It's a bazarre way... This idea, however... won Peter Mitchell a Nobel Prize...