TCSE: Ted Corpus Search Engine

Recorded at	July 13, 2011
Event	TEDGlobal 2011
Duration (min:sec)	14:49
Video Type	TED Stage Talk
Words per minute	206.19 very fast
Readability (FK)	58.24 easy
Speaker	Lee Cronin


1	00:15	What I'm going to try and do in the next 15 minutes or so is tell you about an idea of how we're going to make matter come alive.
2	00:23	Now this may seem a bit ambitious, but when you look at yourself, you look at your hands, you realize that you're alive.
3	00:29	So this is a start.
4	00:31	Now this quest started four billion years ago on planet Earth.
5	00:34	There's been four billion years of organic, biological life.
6	00:38	And as an inorganic chemist, my friends and colleagues make this distinction between the organic, living world and the inorganic, dead world.
7	00:47	And what I'm going to try and do is plant some ideas about how we can transform inorganic, dead matter into living matter, into inorganic biology.
8	00:57	Before we do that, I want to kind of put biology in its place.
9	01:02	And I'm absolutely enthralled by biology.
10	01:04	I love to do synthetic biology.
11	01:06	I love things that are alive.
12	01:08	I love manipulating the infrastructure of biology.
13	01:10	But within that infrastructure, we have to remember that the driving force of biology is really coming from evolution.
14	01:18	And evolution, although it was established well over 100 years ago by Charles Darwin and a vast number of other people, evolution still is a little bit intangible.
15	01:28	And when I talk about Darwinian evolution, I mean one thing and one thing only, and that is survival of the fittest.
16	01:34	And so forget about evolution in a kind of metaphysical way.
17	01:38	Think about evolution in terms of offspring competing, and some winning.
18	01:44	So bearing that in mind, as a chemist, I wanted to ask myself the question frustrated by biology: What is the minimal unit of matter that can undergo Darwinian evolution?
19	01:56	And this seems quite a profound question.
20	01:58	And as a chemist, we're not used to profound questions every day.
21	02:02	So when I thought about it, then suddenly I realized that biology gave us the answer.
22	02:08	And in fact, the smallest unit of matter that can evolve independently is, in fact, a single cell -- a bacteria.
23	02:16	So this raises three really important questions: What is life?
24	02:21	Is biology special?
25	02:23	Biologists seem to think so.
26	02:25	Is matter evolvable?
27	02:27	Now if we answer those questions in reverse order, the third question -- is matter evolvable? -- if we can answer that, then we're going to know how special biology is, and maybe, just maybe, we'll have some idea of what life really is.
28	02:41	So here's some inorganic life.
29	02:43	This is a dead crystal, and I'm going to do something to it, and it's going to become alive.
30	02:49	And you can see, it's kind of pollinating, germinating, growing.
31	02:54	This is an inorganic tube.
32	02:56	And all these crystals here under the microscope were dead a few minutes ago, and they look alive.
33	03:00	Of course, they're not alive.
34	03:02	It's a chemistry experiment where I've made a crystal garden.
35	03:05	But when I saw this, I was really fascinated, because it seemed lifelike.
36	03:10	And as I pause for a few seconds, have a look at the screen.
37	03:15	You can see there's architecture growing, filling the void.
38	03:18	And this is dead.
39	03:20	So I was positive that, if somehow we can make things mimic life, let's go one step further.
40	03:26	Let's see if we can actually make life.
41	03:28	But there's a problem, because up until maybe a decade ago, we were told that life was impossible and that we were the most incredible miracle in the universe.
42	03:37	In fact, we were the only people in the universe.
43	03:41	Now, that's a bit boring.
44	03:43	So as a chemist, I wanted to say, "Hang on. What is going on here?
45	03:47	Is life that improbable?"
46	03:49	And this is really the question.
47	03:52	I think that perhaps the emergence of the first cells was as probable as the emergence of the stars.
48	03:58	And in fact, let's take that one step further.
49	04:01	Let's say that if the physics of fusion is encoded into the universe, maybe the physics of life is as well.
50	04:09	And so the problem with chemists -- and this is a massive advantage as well -- is we like to focus on our elements.
51	04:15	In biology, carbon takes center stage.
52	04:18	And in a universe where carbon exists and organic biology, then we have all this wonderful diversity of life.
53	04:25	In fact, we have such amazing lifeforms that we can manipulate.
54	04:29	We're awfully careful in the lab to try and avoid various biohazards.
55	04:33	Well what about matter?
56	04:35	If we can make matter alive, would we have a matterhazard?
57	04:38	So think, this is a serious question.
58	04:40	If your pen could replicate, that would be a bit of a problem.
59	04:45	So we have to think differently if we're going to make stuff come alive.
60	04:49	And we also have to be aware of the issues.
61	04:51	But before we can make life, let's think for a second what life really is characterized by.
62	04:57	And forgive the complicated diagram.
63	04:59	This is just a collection of pathways in the cell.
64	05:02	And the cell is obviously for us a fascinating thing.
65	05:06	Synthetic biologists are manipulating it.
66	05:09	Chemists are trying to study the molecules to look at disease.
67	05:12	And you have all these pathways going on at the same time.
68	05:14	You have regulation; information is transcribed; catalysts are made; stuff is happening.
69	05:20	But what does a cell do?
70	05:22	Well it divides, it competes, it survives.
71	05:26	And I think that is where we have to start in terms of thinking about building from our ideas in life.
72	05:32	But what else is life characterized by?
73	05:34	Well, I like think of it as a flame in a bottle.
74	05:38	And so what we have here is a description of single cells replicating, metabolizing, burning through chemistries.
75	05:46	And so we have to understand that if we're going to make artificial life or understand the origin of life, we need to power it somehow.
76	05:53	So before we can really start to make life, we have to really think about where it came from.
77	05:58	And Darwin himself mused in a letter to a colleague that he thought that life probably emerged in some warm little pond somewhere -- maybe not in Scotland, maybe in Africa, maybe somewhere else.
78	06:09	But the real honest answer is, we just don't know, because there is a problem with the origin.
79	06:15	Imagine way back, four and a half billion years ago, there is a vast chemical soup of stuff.
80	06:20	And from this stuff we came.
81	06:22	So when you think about the improbable nature of what I'm going to tell you in the next few minutes, just remember, we came from stuff on planet Earth.
82	06:31	And we went through a variety of worlds.
83	06:34	The RNA people would talk about the RNA world.
84	06:37	We somehow got to proteins and DNA.
85	06:39	We then got to the last ancestor.
86	06:41	Evolution kicked in -- and that's the cool bit.
87	06:44	And here we are.
88	06:46	But there's a roadblock that you can't get past.
89	06:49	You can decode the genome, you can look back, you can link us all together by a mitochondrial DNA, but we can't get further than the last ancestor, the last visible cell that we could sequence or think back in history.
90	07:03	So we don't know how we got here.
91	07:06	So there are two options: intelligent design, direct and indirect -- so God, or my friend.
92	07:15	Now talking about E.T. putting us there, or some other life, just pushes the problem further on.
93	07:21	I'm not a politician, I'm a scientist.
94	07:24	The other thing we need to think about is the emergence of chemical complexity.
95	07:28	This seems most likely.
96	07:30	So we have some kind of primordial soup.
97	07:32	And this one happens to be a good source of all 20 amino acids.
98	07:36	And somehow these amino acids are combined, and life begins.
99	07:42	But life begins, what does that mean?
100	07:44	What is life? What is this stuff of life?
101	07:47	So in the 1950s, Miller-Urey did their fantastic chemical Frankenstein experiment, where they did the equivalent in the chemical world.
102	07:56	They took the basic ingredients, put them in a single jar and ignited them and put a lot of voltage through.
103	08:03	And they had a look at what was in the soup, and they found amino acids, but nothing came out, there was no cell.
104	08:10	So the whole area's been stuck for a while, and it got reignited in the '80s when analytical technologies and computer technologies were coming on.
105	08:19	In my own laboratory, the way we're trying to create inorganic life is by using many different reaction formats.
106	08:26	So what we're trying to do is do reactions -- not in one flask, but in tens of flasks, and connect them together, as you can see with this flow system, all these pipes.
107	08:34	We can do it microfluidically, we can do it lithographically, we can do it in a 3D printer, we can do it in droplets for colleagues.
108	08:41	And the key thing is to have lots of complex chemistry just bubbling away.
109	08:46	But that's probably going to end in failure, so we need to be a bit more focused.
110	08:52	And the answer, of course, lies with mice.
111	08:54	This is how I remember what I need as a chemist.
112	08:57	I say, "Well I want molecules."
113	08:59	But I need a metabolism, I need some energy.
114	09:02	I need some information, and I need a container.
115	09:05	Because if I want evolution, I need containers to compete.
116	09:09	So if you have a container, it's like getting in your car.
117	09:13	"This is my car, and I'm going to drive around and show off my car."
118	09:17	And I imagine you have a similar thing in cellular biology with the emergence of life.
119	09:23	So these things together give us evolution, perhaps.
120	09:26	And the way to test it in the laboratory is to make it minimal.
121	09:30	So what we're going to try and do is come up with an inorganic Lego kit of molecules.
122	09:35	And so forgive the molecules on the screen, but these are a very simple kit.
123	09:39	There's only maybe three or four different types of building blocks present.
124	09:41	And we can aggregate them together and make literally thousands and thousands of really big nano-molecular molecules the same size of DNA and proteins, but there's no carbon in sight.
125	09:52	Carbon is banned.
126	09:54	And so with this Lego kit, we have the diversity required for complex information storage without DNA.
127	10:03	But we need to make some containers.
128	10:05	And just a few months ago in my lab, we were able to take these very same molecules and make cells with them.
129	10:10	And you can see on the screen a cell being made.
130	10:13	And we're now going to put some chemistry inside and do some chemistry in this cell.
131	10:16	And all I wanted to show you is we can set up molecules in membranes, in real cells, and then it sets up a kind of molecular Darwinism, a molecular survival of the fittest.
132	10:28	And this movie here shows this competition between molecules.
133	10:32	Molecules are competing for stuff.
134	10:34	They're all made of the same stuff, but they want their shape to win.
135	10:38	They want their shape to persist.
136	10:40	And that is the key.
137	10:42	If we can somehow encourage these molecules to talk to each other and make the right shapes and compete, they will start to form cells that will replicate and compete.
138	10:51	If we manage to do that, forget the molecular detail.
139	10:56	Let's zoom out to what that could mean.
140	10:58	So we have this special theory of evolution that applies only to organic biology, to us.
141	11:03	If we could get evolution into the material world, then I propose we should have a general theory of evolution.
142	11:09	And that's really worth thinking about.
143	11:12	Does evolution control the sophistication of matter in the universe?
144	11:17	Is there some driving force through evolution that allows matter to compete?
145	11:22	So that means we could then start to develop different platforms for exploring this evolution.
146	11:29	So you imagine, if we're able to create a self-sustaining artificial life form, not only will this tell us about the origin of life -- that it's possible that the universe doesn't need carbon to be alive; it can use anything -- we can then take [it] one step further and develop new technologies, because we can then use software control for evolution to code in.
147	11:49	So imagine we make a little cell.
148	11:51	We want to put it out in the environment, and we want it to be powered by the Sun.
149	11:55	What we do is we evolve it in a box with a light on.
150	11:58	And we don't use design anymore. We find what works.
151	12:01	We should take our inspiration from biology.
152	12:03	Biology doesn't care about the design unless it works.
153	12:07	So this will reorganize the way we design things.
154	12:11	But not only just that, we will start to think about how we can start to develop a symbiotic relationship with biology.
155	12:18	Wouldn't it be great if you could take these artificial biological cells and fuse them with biological ones to correct problems that we couldn't really deal with?
156	12:27	The real issue in cellular biology is we are never going to understand everything, because it's a multidimensional problem put there by evolution.
157	12:35	Evolution cannot be cut apart.
158	12:38	You need to somehow find the fitness function.
159	12:41	And the profound realization for me is that, if this works, the concept of the selfish gene gets kicked up a level, and we really start talking about selfish matter.
160	12:51	And what does that mean in a universe where we are right now the highest form of stuff?
161	12:56	You're sitting on chairs.
162	12:58	They're inanimate, they're not alive.
163	13:00	But you are made of stuff, and you are using stuff, and you enslave stuff.
164	13:04	So using evolution in biology, and in inorganic biology, for me is quite appealing, quite exciting.
165	13:12	And we're really becoming very close to understanding the key steps that makes dead stuff come alive.
166	13:20	And again, when you're thinking about how improbable this is, remember, five billion years ago, we were not here, and there was no life.
167	13:28	So what will that tell us about the origin of life and the meaning of life?
168	13:33	But perhaps, for me as a chemist, I want to keep away from general terms; I want to think about specifics.
169	13:39	So what does it mean about defining life?
170	13:41	We really struggle to do this.
171	13:43	And I think, if we can make inorganic biology, and we can make matter become evolvable, that will in fact define life.
172	13:50	I propose to you that matter that can evolve is alive, and this gives us the idea of making evolvable matter.
173	13:58	Thank you very much.
174	14:00	(Applause)
175	14:07	Chris Anderson: Just a quick question on timeline.
176	14:11	You believe you're going to be successful in this project?
177	14:13	When?
178	14:15	Lee Cronin: So many people think that life took millions of years to kick in.
179	14:19	We're proposing to do it in just a few hours, once we've set up the right chemistry.
180	14:26	CA: And when do you think that will happen?
181	14:28	LC: Hopefully within the next two years.
182	14:31	CA: That would be a big story.
183	14:33	(Laughter)
184	14:35	In your own mind, what do you believe the chances are that walking around on some other planet is non-carbon-based life, walking or oozing or something?
185	14:43	LC: I think it's 100 percent.
186	14:45	Because the thing is, we are so chauvinistic to biology, if you take away carbon, there's other things that can happen.
187	14:50	So the other thing that if we were able to create life that's not based on carbon, maybe we can tell NASA what really to look for.
188	14:57	Don't go and look for carbon, go and look for evolvable stuff.
189	15:00	CA: Lee Cronin, good luck. (LC: Thank you very much.)
190	15:02	(Applause)

Lee Cronin: Making matter come alive