James Tour
speaker
1,512 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2025
last heard 15 Dec
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 Dec 2025 with 1.
Appearances
You have the nucleotides, which are RNA and DNA.
And then you have the polypeptides, which are proteins and our enzymes, the little things that construct our body.
Nobody has ever made those polymers, any classes, any of those by prebiotic route.
By prebiotic route, I mean using the chemicals and techniques that would have been available on an early Earth.
That means prebiotically.
Can we make some of those structures synthetically in a laboratory?
Absolutely.
We can do this.
Normally, what we'll do is we'll take a cell and deconstruct it and then rebuild the pieces as we want.
Not only can we not make the polymers of these, we can't even make the individual units of these in a prebiotically relevant manner.
Each of these has stereochemistry.
People will say, well, what about the Miller-Urey experiment in 1953?
The Miller-Urey experiment made several of the amino acids just by taking sparks and this reducing environment and having certain gases in there and they found amino acids.
Nobody has ever been able to take that type of mixture and do anything useful with it because the molecules don't have handedness.
Molecules can come in two forms, a right-handed and a left-handed version.
Almost all biological molecules... Molecules have handedness?
Absolutely.
Just as if you look at your left hand and your right hand, these are mirror images of each other.
If you hold your left hand up to a mirror, you will see what looks like your right hand.
If you hold your right hand up to the mirror, what you'll see is what looks like your left hand.
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