Nick Lane

But the membrane is five nanometers in thickness.

So that's five millionths of a millimeter.

So if you shrank yourself down to the size of a molecule or stood next to that membrane,

you would experience 30 million volts per meter, which is equivalent to a bolt of lightning.

So that's the strength of the force of the voltage across the membrane, which is colossal.

And it's generated by really sophisticated proteins that pump protons across the membrane.

And then it's ATP synthase, which is, again, pretty much universal.

And it's a rotating nanomotor that sits in the membrane.

This is colossally complex, interesting machinery.

And it's universally conserved.

It's as conserved as, say, a ribosome.

The protein-building factors are pretty much everywhere across life.

So you wonder, how on earth did life come to be that way?

And if it's conserved universally across life, it looks like it goes right back to the common ancestors of all the cells.

And so there's the question, how did it arise in the first place?

And that was actually for me tremendously thrilling because it's a way in as a researcher to the origin of life.

It says, how did these energy generating systems arise in the first place?

And my way in was really the gates were opened by Bill Martin and Mike Russell, who around the early 2000s were publishing some amazing papers together where they were saying that in this deep sea hydrothermal vent, rather than it being like a black smoker with a chimney with smoke belching out of the top, it's like a mineralized sponge.

with lots of pores that are cell-like in their structure and you've got an acidic early ocean and you've got alkaline fluids coming out of these and you've got mixing going on in this whole system and so you could at least imagine that you've got a pore in here which is a bit like a cell in terms of its size and its shape and on the outside you've got acid ocean waters percolating in and on the inside you've got these hydrothermal fluids so you've got a barrier

you've got an inside and an outside, and you've got more protons outside coming in, potentially driving work.