Like many young children, Sijbran Otto was fascinated by the history of life and wanted to dig disosurios when he grew up. But life does not always go as planned, and ended up becoming not a paleontologist in the field, but a chemist in the laboratory. Even so, perhaps that was the way out of his childhood dream. Thanks to a surprise discovery, his work would lead him closer to what any fossil could to the heart of one of the deepest questions about life on earth.
In 2010, Otto ran into some of the first synthetic molecules that could self -apply. Since then, he has been trying to convince them in states that look intriguingly to life. “We have in the legs that accumulate to make them make more and more realistic things, not only replicated, but also metabolise and evolve,” he says.
That simple chemicals can be wing in this way is surprising enough. But recently, Otto’s experiments have also offered attempt that life can be better described as a new state of matter, an idea proposed by Addy Pross, a chemist from the Ben-Gurion University of Ninev in Israel. “It is a bridge that joins the physical and biological worlds,” says Pros.
The hope is that studying the physical processes that support life can how it originated and illuminates its nature. The results already suggest that Darwinian evolution can only be a facet of a more general evolutionary principle that also applies to the non -vital world. In which case, researchers argue, evolution …
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