Nick Lane

But the ocean chemistry is different because there's oxygen, there's no iron, there's no nickel in the oceans.

So you can go to a vent like Lost City and the walls are not made of catalytic minerals anymore.

They're made of aragonite and brucite, so kind of calcium carbonate and magnesium hydroxides and things like that.

And so the chemistry it can do is very different and there's lots of bacteria living there.

So I would gain beyond just the sheer amazement of seeing it.

There's not a lot it would be able to tell me.

So what we're actually doing is experiments in a lab in an anaerobic glove box where you exclude the oxygen so you can do these experiments from reacting hydrogen and CO2.

How many of the molecules in biochemistry can we produce that way?

And it's slow and laborious and you get small amounts and sometimes you get contaminations and sometimes you have to start all over again.

And it's slow work.

But it's moving forward.

It's not just us either.

I mean, there's other groups around the world.

So Joseph Morin's group, for example, has done a lot of really nice biochemistry along these lines.

So that's kind of moving forward, but I think we're talking decades before we're getting to the level where we can say, right, we can drive flux through all of metabolism and here's the set of conditions that will do it.

Certainly some years.

There are big crux points like making purine nucleotides where there's 12 steps in this synthetic pathway and all the intermediates are unstable and break down easily.

It's been done.

in things like methanol, so not in water.

In water, stuff breaks down.