Dr. Sara Seager

And their tails don't like water.

They're hydrophobic.

And those point inwards.

And so then the geometry self-arranges to a little spherical vesicle.

And my team at MIT has repeated this experiment with using different lipids also.

Well, some of these lipids are stable in concentrated sulfuric acid.

And they also join together and make these little tiny vesicles, which you subsequently look at them under the microscope and you see these little spheres.

Yes, I definitely have because people traditionally are so, maybe naturally so, but they're so biased against the even hint of an idea that there could be life in concentrated sulfuric acid.

People are very, very resistant to this.

Well, we certainly don't have all the answers.

So we're starting from something way simpler than life itself and just the biomolecular building blocks.

So for example, we took our 20 biogenic amino acids and we have put those in concentrated sulfuric acid.

And we found with one exception that all of them are stable.

Some of them are chemically modified, but the rest are stable.

And that's the kind of thing, if we talk about it in a scientific community, people will be like, well, that's interesting.

That is astonishing.

But how is that helpful?

We need to think about amino acids joined together to form peptides.

Then we can study peptides in concentrated sulfuric acid.

And that's an ongoing project right now where we're definitely finding that, although some of them break down, we are definitely finding variants that are stable.