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
We have to make four classes of chemicals, carbohydrates, we have to be able to make the lipids, we have to make the amino acids, and we have to make the nucleotides, the things that make up RNA and DNA.
We have those four classes.
Nobody has ever made those in a prebiotically relevant manner in an anti-pure form.
Meteorites, interstellar systems, they don't deliver sufficient quantities in the purities that you would need.
Even Sutherland, who is an origin of life chemist, agrees that these are in such gross mixtures, they're unusual.
We have the mass transfer problem.
How do you go from a starting material all the way through the product of a cell?
How do you polymerize any of these molecules?
The free energy is positive.
Lee knows this is a huge problem.
Nobody knows how to address that.
The polymer stability.
If you had one enzyme that happened to form,
how long would that last?
If you had one RNA molecule, how long would that last?
And with RNA, it would last hours.
That's it, hours.
That's all you have.
With an enzyme, it would last something on the order of a few days, and that's it.
So when you're talking about geological timeframes, there's not enough time for these things to last.
Showing 61–80 of 167 · page 4 of 9
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