Lindau Meetings: Jack Szostak on the Origin of Life

There's a big bonus in this video: an à-la-Star-Wars animation of the 1980s showing an asteroid zooming across space and presumably colliding with Earth causing the image to tremble. That was a lot of fun. Less so was the video, in my opinion.

Jack Szostak won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his work in elucidating the functions of telomeres in chromosomes. I don't know much about telomeres, but the notion that these short specialized DNA sequences situated at the tips of chromosomes could protect the latter from impairment sounds pretty cool to me. The video does not elaborate on telomeres though. Instead, we are presented with chitchats about the origin of life. Interesting, I know — but it could have been cooler still.

Szostak's current works deal with figuring out how life started on Earth, and through his conversation with Abigail, it seems clear that this is a subject close to his heart. Because Abigail is a chemist, the talks about the origin of life were restricted to chemistry. More specifically, the two discussed the chiro-bias of molecules like amino acids in nature and how comprehending the onset of this bias might lead us closer to deciphering the origin of life on Earth. Believe me when I say that I, too, thought that this would grab my interest.

I'm afraid, though, that ensuing discussions about how an asteroid collision may have elicited the bias put me off. Szostak's and Abigail's knowledge on the subject seemed shallow and speculative at best, and listening to them trying to explain the "asteroid hypothesis" was not very satisfying. Of course, the so-called hypothesis may well be the answer to the chiro-bias observed today, but I'm not convinced yet.

Truth be told, after watching the video I couldn't help but think that it was a missed opportunity to let us know what one of the greatest scientists of our times was currently working on. I'd be more interested in getting to know how Szostak is actually getting his hands dirty to decipher the origin of life on Earth than to listen to the (albeit) exuberant Abigail speculating about the effect of an asteroid collision.

The video is not all bad though. In the beginning, Abigail talks about how current scientific research is much more industrially-driven and applications-based and less curiosity-driven as it was in the past. As a kid, I always thought that scientists were great thinkers who would then do experiments to comprehend things they did not understand — to quench their need for answers and knowledge. However, when I was taught how to write an abstract in university, one of the first things the tutor stressed was that we had to properly convey the purpose of the experiment, in terms of its findings' practical potentials. What this meant to my first-year undergraduate self was that experiments should have a practical end-product. Experiments for the sake of knowledge alone were not good enough apparently. This was a sad thought because it was the first time I realized that the scientific community was a money-driven industry — that perhaps science's aim was no longer knowledge but profit.