Nick Lane

So it's very much like a cell is structured.

And the other thing is, what are these minerals?

You've got these mineralized sponges that pours with minerals.

Well, the minerals we think on the early Earth would have been a lot of metals in there.

So things like iron sulfide or nickel sulfide and things like that.

Now, the reason that's important is that

What plant cells do, but also what autotrophic bacteria do, is they take CO2 and they take hydrogen and they react them together to basically make all the building blocks of life.

Now, plants get the hydrogen from water.

H2O, they take the H2 out of water and throw away the oxygen and that collects in the atmosphere.

But what bacteria very often do is they've got hydrogen bubbling out of a hydrothermal vent.

They just take the hydrogen gas and they react it with CO2 and they make all the building blocks of life.

So what are the enzymes that they use to do that?

Well, they're very often using these same metals that you would have found in the early oceans, nickel and iron and so on.

And how are they powering the reaction between hydrogen and CO2?

Well, they're using this membrane potential, the electrical potential, the difference in protons between the outside and the inside to drive that work.

So effectively to power the reaction between hydrogen and CO2 to make organics and drive growth.

So this was all kind of in place before I came along.

This was coming from Mike Russell and Bill Martin.

And the details are very uncertain.

And whether or not you can really drive any biochemistry that way is very uncertain.