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Nick Lane
96 quotes
“Mitochondria are a badly kept secret. ...There are usually hudreds or thousands of them in a single cell, where they use oxygen to burn up food. ...[O]ne billion ...would fit comfortably on a grain of sand.”
“According to mitochondrial gene analysis, man didn't interbreed with Homo Sapiens...”
“[T]he contends that ageing and many of... [its associated] diseases... are caused by... free radicals leaking from mitochondria during normal . ...As they burn up food using oxygen, the free-radical sparks escape to damage adjacent structures ...Many cruel inherited conditions... are linked with mutations caused by free radicals attacking mitochondrial genes.”
“From around the mid 1990s, researchers discovered that is... governed... by the mitochondria. ...[T]he failure to commit apoptosis is the root cause of cancer. ...In cancer, individual cells bid for freedom ...Without , the bonds that bind cells in complex s might never have ebvolved.”
“[A]ll multicellular plants and animals... contain mitochondria.”
“[A]fter a decade of careful , it looks as if all known eukaryotic cells either have or once had... mitochondria.”
“[T]he mechanism by which mitochondria generate energy, by pumping protons across a membrane (), is found in all forms of life... It's a bazarre way... This idea, however... won Peter Mitchell a Nobel Prize...”
“Different species have transferred different genes to the nucleus, but all species with mitochondria have... retained... the same core contingent of mitochondrial genes.”
“[L]ife will probably get stuck in a bacterial rut elsewhere in the universe... we might not be alone, but will almost certainly be lonely.”
“This membrane, so vanishingly thin, looms large... for bacteria use it for generating their energy.”
“[[Bacteria|[B]acteria]], the simplest of cells, are... so complex that we still have almost everything to learn about their invisible organization.”
“The possessors of... nuclei, the s, are the most important cells in the world. ...[A]ll plants and animals, all and fungi... essentially everything we can see with the naked eye, is composed of [them]...”
“In bacteria, the DNA forms into a long and twisted loop. The contorted tracks... close... to form a singular circular . In eukaryotic cells, there are usually a number of different chromosomes... each has two separate ends.”
“[N]o bacteria coat their DNA with s: their DNA is naked. The histones not only protect eukaryotic DNA from chemical attack, but also guard access to the genes.”
“The information encoded in DNA spells out the molecular structure of s. This, said Crick, is the 'central dogma' of all biology: genes code for proteins.”
“The sequence of letters in a specifies the sequence of s in a protein. If the sequence of letters is changed—a —this may change the structure of the protein (...not always, there is some redundancy... technically degeneracy..—several combinations... can code for the same amino acid.)”
“s are the crowning glory of life. ...[T]he rich variety of life is almost entirely attributable to the... variety of proteins. ...Perhaps the most important group are the s ...biological catalysts that speed up the rate of biochemical reactions ...with an astonishing degree of selectivity for ...raw materials.”
“The DNA code is inert... stored safely... For daily use the cell relies on disposable photocopies... made of RNA... composed of similar building blocks... spun out on a single strand rather than the... double helix.”
“Does it make sense that life is cellular? Would you expect to find life being cellular elsewhere? I suspect that for organic life... it would be cellular.”
“[T]here's a limit to just how far vents can take you... but... once you've gotten as far as , then you've freed yourself from a fairly small energy flow, a fairly tight and focused energy flow.”
“It does seem to me, from our experience of life on earth that allows you to... step up, by probably orders of magnitude in just how much life can take over a planet.”
“One is pretty much the same as another stromatolite, to my eye. That probably gets the stromatolite biologists in a fury, I suspect...”
“I'm not particularly... eucaryocentric, but I do think there is a problem to solve there. ...There is a difference in morphology ...”
“To me it [we] means life as a whole, so I would include bacteria in we. ...Life on earth is a whole, yes I think so. We share the . We share the same cell structures. I feel quite a strong fellow feeling with bacteria.”
“If we, meaning humans now... find life somewhere else, most people would be disappointed if it turned out only to be bacteria.”
“Now, if we get to complex life and we get beyond organic life forms into artificial intelligence, post-biological, then anything goes and maybe that's what we should be looking for.”
“[W]e are biochemically quite simple in comparison bacteria. Simpler than bacteria. In terms of our metabolic biochemistry we are really limited. ...[W]e have ...across the entire domain of s, about the same degree of metabolic sophistication as a single bacterial cell.”
“They [bacteria] haven't used it [their more complex metabolism]... to give rise to more complex morphologies beyond the kind of stromatolite type structures, beyond s. That seems to be a limit. Some multicellularity, some degree of differentiation and complexity, but nothing... to compare with the flea.”
“I think we share consciousness right across... not just even the animal world. I would see it going down even to the level of cells, some kind of flickering of consciousness. So I don't feel alone on earth, but I do think that there is something different about humans.”
“We also have a power to destroy the earth, and... it's probably unique. ...Destroy ourselves, destroy a large part of life in earth, not the bacteria... If we take ourselves out, we'll give it five million years and it will be indistinguishable, apart from ourselves.”
“Viruses are quite sophisticated in the sense that they're forming virion particles and they're infecting other cells... s and things... selfish genes, I suppose in the broadest sense.”
“s of some sort [lie between a hydrothermal vent system and a virus] in my mind. The trouble with viruses is that they do need a sophisticated environment to make copies of themselves. Same with selfish jumping genes, transposable elements and so on. They need to be in an environment where they can take advantage of something which is converting the environment into copies of themselves, and there's a rule... This is changing with the discovery of all these es, but as a rule you need some form of to convert the environment into copies of yourself.”
“Now it's possible to have some kind of protocell with some form of metabolism without any genetic heredity. It's possible in principle. Is it alive?”
“I read some of those ideas years ago, , and thought it was thrilling. Over recent years I don't really see the need for a kind of genetic intermediary between an RNA level of genetic replication and some other form of replicator. ...[T]here's no suggestion that it's there in biology. There's no suggestion that I know from geology that is capable of giving rise to more complex systems, or to having an organic takeover. It seems to add in a layer of unnecessary complexity. So I much prefer to get straight into organic chemistry, and straight into as we know it.”
“[W]hy is metabolism structured this way? There has to be thermodynamic underpinnings for it, otherwise it wouldn't happen. It had to have arisen in the absence of genes... in my mind and therefore there must be environments which are favoring protocells with this kind of metabolism, making copies of themselves... In my mind they have to get better at it, otherwise RNA is just never going to appear.”
“Whether you define life as living or not is really a matter of opinion... It's a continuum. You can draw a line wherever you want or healthier not to draw a line at all... I think there has to be some form of an environment capable of giving rise to some form of , which is capable of giving rise to nucleotides. ...They would put me in the metabolism first camp, but I dislike the tag... because I think it's simply about... the line across a continuum...”
“It's interesting... that life as a rule does not use UV radiation as an energy source, and the kind of chemistry that's being done using it doesn't resemble biochemistry as I know it... [T]he kind of environment that I'm talking about is deep sea s, and the question is, "Well, does it have to be deep sea? Could it... be same systems on land?" and they exist on land. They perfectly could. So it's perfectly feasible.”
“[Yellowstone] are not alkaline thermal vents... There are vents... of this serpentinized hosted systems with alkaline fluids rich in gas. ...A place called The Cedars in northern California ...Ken Nealson is the guy. ...He's done a lot of work up in The Cedars.”
Nick Lane (born 1967) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 32:37 Ref: Microbial diversity in The Cedars, an ultrabasic, ultrareducing, and low salinity serpentinizing ecosystem (2013) Shino Suzuki, Shun'ichi Ishii, Angela Wu and Kenneth H. Nealson. Ref: Narrowing gaps between E…
“The only way that you can really get a selfish replicator to be unselfish is to put it in a bag with a bunch of other selfish replicators, and then they're more or less obliged to cooperate.”
“So if you think of it from a protocell point of view, the selfish replicators which are the best at making copies of themselves are necessarily those that are best able to make the entire protocell replicate itself.”
“The s were acquired by a eukaryotic cell that was already a fully fledged eukaryotic cell.”
“These are all lifestyles that exist in bacteria anyway. ...Photosynthesis obviously. The only eukaryotic lifestyle that does not exist at all in bacteria is ... the ability to engulf other cells, to grow around them. That's never been found yet in bacteria. It seems to require... a lot of energy, a large complicated system capable of changing shape and moving around. ...For whatever reasons it never evolved. I would say the reason was that you need mitochondria to get that large and complex in the first place.”
“A single discovery tomorrow could disprove everything I'm saying now. That's quite thrilling. ...We have been looking for several hundred years since Leeuwenhoek and we've not found anything really shocking that falls out of the system.”
“We all share this basic machinery in cells, and it's not related to whether you're photosynthetic or whether you're phagocytes or whether you are a fungus or whether you're an animal cell. We all share the same machinery. Why? The possibility is that it's not about adaptation to the external world, it's about adaptation to these s. These pesky bacteria that went on to become a mitochondria. Maybe this conflict of interest... [that] had to be resolved somehow was what was driving a lot the elaboration of cellular machinery. It's a kind of local... intimate conflict.”
“I said you [bacteria] are not morphologically complex, you are biochemically awesome.”
“That's why they [viruses] are not in the tree of life. They don't relate in a very direct way. ...[T]he tree of life now is not only about ribosomes. You can build trees from whole genomes, but viral genomes? They don't really fit in, in a way which makes sense to people.”
“I like philosophers. I think they can teach scientists how to think very often, and... there's a lot of sloppy thinking among scientists, and I think philosophers can be quite rigorous about it. It gets a lot of scientists cross with philosophers who don't engage with science, but I think there are more philosophers these days who are engaging in a serious way with science. I think they have important things to say.”
“[M]ost of what I teach and interact with the students is more about life on earth and the principles governing evolution, and from my own point of view, the biochemical side, which is not normally part of the evolutionary biology... [I]t's relatively rare for me to discuss life elsewhere in the Universe with them.”
“Thew problem here for me is that I'm in a biology department and is still somewhat frowned upon by a lot of biologists who would see it as a form of speculation. So the courses that I teach are about life on earth and they're not so much about life in the Universe... [I]t is something that I should develop, I think.”
“There are people at UCL, Ian Crawford, who's doing a great deal for , but it's not something which is happening through my department. It's happening through s. It's not happening in biological sciences...”