Nick Lane

But what's in that cassette, you don't really know.

So the more you do of it, the more you will degenerate yourself as well.

I see.

So there's kind of costs and benefits to doing it.

Yeah, I mean, there's so many aspects to this story.

There's so many possible answers I could give there.

I mean, in terms of...

eukaryotes, giant bacteria, the likelihood of life.

I think there's a lot depends on observation.

We simply don't know enough about what's out there.

And so it's not necessarily experimentation.

Simply, if I assert that giant bacteria are always going to have extreme polyploidy with multiple copies of their genome, you find an example that's not like that.

And already my ideas are breaking up.

So-

useful to know.

For the origin of life, I really wish I could come up with a convincing reason why I should go down in a submersible to a deep sea hydrothermal system like Lost City.

I would love to go to Lost City.

But the trouble is that the ocean chemistry is completely different now to what it was 4 billion years ago.

It's now full of oxygen.

It's full of bacteria and things as well.