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Betül Kaçar

👤 Person
1202 total appearances

Appearances Over Time

Podcast Appearances

Lex Fridman Podcast
#350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens

It's a pretty rigid, established input-output system.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens

And it's all chemistry.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens

My PhD is in chemistry, but I don't do origin of life chemistry.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens

Yes, absolutely.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens

Just make sure that you have good chemist friends if you're interested in origin of life.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens

That's 100% required.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens

It should be mandatory.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens

Well, chemically, I think that's it.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens

You have enzymes, you have proteins.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens

Enzymes are doing their thing.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens

They know how to chew energy using ATP or GTP.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens

They know what to do in their own way.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens

They do their enzymatic thing.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens

So it's not just the ribosome that is at the heart of the transition, but there are a lot of different proteins.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens

You're looking at about 100 different components that compose this machinery.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens

You cannot have life without chemistry.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens

You cannot have any cellular process without chemistry.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens

What makes life interesting is that even if the chemistry is imperfect, even if there are accidents along the way, if something binds to another chemical in a way it shouldn't, there is resilience within the system that it can maybe not necessarily repair itself when it moves on.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens

However, imperfect mistakes can be handled.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens

That's where the biology comes in.