Lee Cronin: The Chemistry of Life ​(#195)

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating

Lee Cronin was born in the UK and was fascinated with science and technology from an early age getting his first computer and chemistry set when he was 8 years old. This is when he first started thinking about programming chemistry and looking for inorganic aliens. He went to the University of York where he completed both a degree and PhD in Chemistry and then on to do post docs in Edinburgh and Germany before becoming a lecturer at the Universities of Birmingham, and then Glasgow where he has been since 2002 working up the ranks to become the Regius Professor of Chemistry in 2013 aged 39. He has one of the largest multidisciplinary chemistry-based research teams in the world, having raised over $35 M in grants and current income of $15 M. He has given over 300 international talks and has authored over 350 peer reviewed papers with recent work published in Nature, Science, and PNAS. 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.

http://www.chem.gla.ac.uk/cronin/

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• 00:00:00 Intro
• 00:01:52 Is chirality necessary for life?
• 00:07:28 What does chemistry tell us about the origin of life? What is life?
• 00:13:04 What is life?
• 00:19:14 What came first, chirality or life?
• 00:23:05 Why is "folding" necessary in biochemistry?
• 00:25:54 The debate about life between intelligent design and science.
• 00:38:55 How do you respond to critics of your methods? Where Miller-Urey went wrong.
• 01:01:33 What would you put in your ethical will?
• 01:02:54 What would you put on a billion-year time capsule (like the monoliths in 2001)?
• 01:04:27 What advice would you give to your younger self?

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