Genesis on the benchtop: how do we study the origin of life in the lab?

The origin of life is a topic that has driven scientific research from many disciplines, ranging from astronomy to organic chemistry. Molecular biology has revealed that all life on earth shares a common ancestor, yet we know little about how those first cells arose. In this talk I will focus on laboratory efforts to understand how pools of molecules can organize and transition into biological systems capable of Darwinian evolution. A long-term goal of this research is to build simple, self-replicating cells in the lab. While this synthetic approach cannot tell us how life on Earth began, it can shed light on the conditions needed for biology to arise - and the likelihood that it has arisen elsewhere

Speaker: Itay Budin, UC Berkeley