Nick Lane

But it's a thrilling idea because you've got a continuity between a geological environment and cells as we know them.

And if it did emerge that way, then it would say, well, here's why bacteria have got this charge on their membrane, because it was there in a hydrothermal vent from the beginning.

It always powered work from the very beginning.

And that's why, in the end, an endosymbiosis that gives rise to eukaryotes would free you from the constraints of generating a charge on a membrane.

Now you internalize that in eukaryotes, and now you're free to become larger and more complex.

So you've gone from thinking about a puzzle about why eukaryotes are special to thinking about planetary systems and thinking about the origin of life and what are the forces that are going to give rise to life and how would that constrain life and would we see the same things on other planets or something different?

What are the fundamental reasons that it works this way?

So it becomes astrobiology, really, and it's a thrilling change of perspective

to come from my own background was to do with mitochondrial biology, actually an organ transplantation once upon a time.

And spinning on a pinhead, you end up working on the origin of life.

It's fantastic.

Yeah, that's basically it.

Yeah.

So what do you get if you react hydrogen and CO2?

What you get are what are called Krebs cycle intermediates.

So carboxylic acid, small molecules made only of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen with this organic acid group at the end, which can be two, three, four, five carbon units in the chain.

And this is your basic building blocks.

You add on ammonia to this and you get an amino acid.

You add more hydrogen on and you're going to get a sugar.

You react amino acids with sugars and you're going to get nucleotides.