Building life from chemistry with Lee Cronin
This episode is with Lee Cronin. He is the Regius Chair of Chemistry in the School of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow. He and his team are trying to make artificial life forms, find alien life, explore the digitization of chemistry, understand how information can be encoded into chemicals and construct chemical computers. In this conversation we talk about topics related to origin of life, framework to build life from inorganic material, assembly theory, Darwinian evolution, and alien life.
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Timestamps:
00:00:00 Introduction
00:00:59 Lee's point of view of origin of life research
00:02:24 Are there different scales in chemistry of origin of life?
00:04:01 Framework to build life
00:06:57 Theory of life
00:12:06 Can Darwinian evolution works beyond at the chemical level?
00:15:59 Fundamental level of selection
00:22:04 Memories of compounds
00:22:42 Assembly theory
00:24:51 Multiverse
00:28:05 Why haven't we managed to build life so far?
00:31:33 How to use automation to build life?
00:36:33 What is essence of life?
00:39:03 Why do we have life only on earth in our solar system?
00:39:33 Experiment to build life
00:40:33 What will be the information of artificial life?
00:41:19 Chemputer
00:44:38 3D printing life forms
00:49:07 How to identify alien life?
00:50:22 Explanation of assembly theory
00:54:22 How to differentiate alien organic or inorganic matter?
00:58:12 Selection at artificial cells
01:02:45 Thank you!
Music by: Ahmed Hassan (https://www.youtube.com/@2ays577/featured)