Dr. James Tour
speaker
167 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 31 Jul
Dr. James Tour’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Nobody knows that.
But yes, in my mind there was God, but I don't have scientific proof of that.
But abiogenesis, which is the topic that Lee and I are discussing, is the origin of life from non-living matter.
And you have to take into account what the Earth would have been like four billion years ago to do that.
Prebiotically relevant is that you have to be able to do this in a way and with reagents and things that may have been available on a prebiotic Earth.
Now, nobody's ever going to know where life came from scientifically.
But what we can do is we can try to put forth a valid hypothesis based on things that we can test in the lab.
The real problem is, if you just look at life itself, and using even Lee's definition, which I'll quote to you, which he said on May 25, 2012, we'll use his definition.
He says, quote, we need genetic code, we need mating, we need metabolism, we need adaptation, we need homeostasis.
And I agree with him.
We need all of those features.
But I think the public has been grossly misled by people like Lee.
As much as I like Lee, I think that the public's been misled by statements that he made in 2011 saying that he will create life in his lab in two years.
He missed that deadline.
Jack Szostak, who was at Harvard at the time and a Nobel Prize winner,
said in 2014 he'd create life in three to five years in his lab.
He has not met that, and now he even confesses he hasn't even been able to make the RNA.
Steve Benner said in 2021 that most of the problems have been solved in Origin of Life.
I think he's backed off that now.
We don't know how to make the basic chemicals of life.
Showing 41–60 of 167 · page 3 of 9
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