Like many young children, Sijbren Otto He was fascinated by the history of his life and wanted to dig up dinosaurs when he grew up. However, life doesn’t always go to planning, and he ultimately became a lab chemist rather than a paleontologist in the field. Still, perhaps it wasn’t too far from his childhood dreams. Thanks to the surprising discoveries, his work will bring him closer than the fossils at the heart of one of the deepest questions about life on earth.
In 2010, Otto stumbled upon some of the first synthetic molecules that could express himself. Since then, he has been trying to cax them into a state that looks as interesting as life. “We’ve been based on them to make them do more and more real things. We’re not only replicating, but also metabolism and evolution,” he says.
This simple chemical can behave like this. However, recently Otto’s experiment also provides tentative evidence that life may be best described as a new state of matter. Addy Proschemist at Ben Gurion University in Negev, Israel. “It’s a bridge that connects the physical world with the biological world,” says Pros.
The hope is that studying the physical processes that support life may explain how it occurred and illuminated its properties. Already, the results suggest that Darwinian evolution may be just one aspect of the more general evolutionary principles that also apply to the non-life world. In that case, researchers will evolve…
