Lee Cronin
speaker
545 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2023
last heard Jun 2024
Lee Cronin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I really had some big arguments, but the copy number caught there, because I think I confused the chemists by saying one-off, and then when I made clear about the copy number, I think that made it a little bit easier. Just to clarify...
Yeah, exactly that. Okay. Exactly.
Yeah, exactly. So on Earth, coming back to Earth, what we did is we took a whole bunch of samples and we were running prebiotic chemistry experiments in the lab. We took various inorganic minerals and extracted them. Look at the volatile because there's a special way of treating minerals and polymers in assembly theory. In our life machine, we're looking at molecules. We don't care about polymers.
because they're not volatile, you can't hold them. If you can't ascertain that they're identical, then it's very difficult for you to work out if there's undergone selection or they're just a random mess. Same with some minerals, but we can come back to that. So basically what you do, we got a whole load of samples, inorganic ones,
We got a load of, we got Scotch whiskey and also took Ardberg, which is one of my favorite whiskeys, which is very peaty. And another whiskey is like, so the way that in Scotland, in Islay, which is a little island, the Scotch, the whiskey is let to mature in barrels. And it's said that the complex molecules in the peat find their way through into the whiskey.
And that's what gives it this intense brown color and really complex flavor. It's literally molecular complexity that does that. And so, you know, vodka is the complete opposite. It's just pure, right?
The higher the assembly index, the better the whiskey. I really love deep, peaty Scottish whiskeys. Near my house, there is one of the lowland distilleries called Glengoyne. It's still beautiful whiskey, but not as complex. So for fun, I took some Glengoyne whiskey in our bag and put them into the mass spec and measured the assembly index. I also got E. coli.
So the way we do it, take the E. coli, break the cell apart, take it all apart, and also got some beer. And people were ridiculing us, saying, oh, beer is evidence of complexity. One of the computational complexity people was just throwing... Yeah, kind of his very vigorous and his disagreement of assembly theory was just saying, you know, you don't know what you're doing.
Even beer is more complicated than human. What he didn't realize is that it's not beer per se. It is taking the yeast extract, taking the extract, breaking the cells, extracting the molecules, and just looking at the profile of the molecules to see if there's anything over the threshold. And we also put in a really complex molecule, taxol.
So he took all of these, but also NASA gave us, I think, five samples. And they wouldn't tell us what they are. They said, no, we don't believe you're going to get this to work. And they really, you know, they gave us some super complex samples. And they gave us two fossils, one that was a million years old and one was at 10,000 years old. Something from Antarctica, seabed.
They gave us a Murchison meteorite and a few others. Put them through the system. So we took all the samples, treat them all identically, put them into mass spec, fragmented them, counted. And in this case, implicit in the measurement was in mass spec, you only detect peaks when you've got more than, let's say, 10,000 identical molecules.
So the copy number's already baked in, but wasn't quantified, which is super important there. This was in the first paper, because I was like, it's abundant, of course. And when you then took it all out, we found that the biological samples...
gave you molecules that had an assembly index greater than 15 and all the abiotic samples were less than 15 and then we took the NASA samples and we looked at the ones that were more than 15 and less than 15 and we gave them back to NASA and they're like, oh gosh, yep, dead, living, dead, living. You got it. Mm-hmm. And that's what we found on Earth. That's a success. Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Resounding success.
So what you were able to do is like the assembly index of, we found high assembly index molecules originating from the beer sample and the E. coli sample. So I mean, I didn't know which one was higher. We wouldn't really do any detail there because now we are doing that because one of the things we've done, it's a secret, but I can tell you. I think it's a secret.
Well, is that we've just mapped the tree of life using assembly theory, because everyone said that you can't do it in biology. And what we're able to do is, so I think there's three ways, well, two ways of doing tree of life, well, three ways, actually.
So the tree of life is basically tracing back the history of life on Earth, all the different species going back, who evolved from what, and it all goes all the way back to the first kind of life forms, and they branch off. And you have plant kingdom, the animal kingdom, the fungi kingdom, and different branches all the way up.
And the way this was classically done, and I'm no evolutionary biologist. Evolution biologists tell me every day, at least 10 times. I want to be one, though. I kind of like biology. It's kind of cool. Yeah, it's very cool. But basically, what Darwin and Mendeleev and all these people do is just they draw pictures, right? And they taxa.
They were able to draw pictures and say, oh, these look like common classes.
Then...
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