Betül Kaçar

We are able to make them interact with one another.

They can get more complex.

Some call this messy.

There's all this chemistry that's going on.

We are able to

have these chemicals interact with one another, maybe have even some emergent properties that we can quantify.

Definitely there is this trend towards more systems-level approach to origins, with more introduction of systems-level chemistry, more network-level chemistry, and complex system integration, in order to understand how, now that we can make these building blocks, we can make them interact with one another, but how do we make them interact with one another in more intelligent ways that will...

have the properties of a biological system, will be heritable, it will be responding to the environment, it will mutate, and it will sustain itself.

That is the final bit, I think, in our Origin of Life adventure.

And we are extremely close.

I'm very optimistic that our community will get a handle on this problem in this decade.

This is, in fact, I think, one of the most exciting times to be doing this work.

These properties that I listed, these five properties that I listed about, and machinery that is capable of sensing and responding to the environment, if we can, I would imagine, similar to Miller-Urey experiments where they...

only sparked in particular environmental forces and were able to produce a chemical that is important for life or a mix of chemicals important for life or building blocks rather.

I would, if I saw that a similar experiment there and well-defined geochemical parameter was

on a mix of chemistry, which led that chemistry to form some level of computation, informatic, biological property.

And by biological, I'm going to keep it to very minimum, as I defined early on.

That would be super exciting to me.

A self-organizing chemistry that we can create experimentally in a flask by simulating the

the conditions of early Earth, be it radiation, be it temperature or mix of both, that would be very cool.