“I am by birth a Genevese, and my family is one of the most distinguished of that republic.” So begin the reminiscences of Victor Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s famous novel. While at university, during a lightning storm, young Victor sees a stream of fire emerge from a beautiful old oak tree. He becomes enamored of all things scientific and proceeds to study electricity, biology, chemistry, and the new science of galvanism. “One of the phenomena which had peculiarly attracted my attention,” recalls Victor years later, “was the structure of the human frame, and, indeed, any animal imbued with life. Whence, I often asked myself, did the principle of life proceed? It was a bold question, and one which has ever been considered as a mystery.” After days and nights of laborious experiments, Victor succeeds in discovering how to bring lifeless matter to life. Almost immediately, he decides that he is not satisfied with the bare secret of life but wants to create a human being, with all the intricacies of fibers, muscles, veins—and a brain.
What was the secret that Victor uncovered? For centuries, human beings have puzzled over the mystery of life. What makes an odd hodgepodge of molecules organize itself into living cells, which pulsate and squirm, feed on their surroundings, and then reproduce? Each of us emerged from the cells of our parents, who emerged from their parents, who emerged from their parents, back and back through the dark halls of time. We accept that astounding descent as a given. But how did it start? Surely, that beginning, the origin of life on our planet, and perhaps the origin of life in the entire cosmos, has a significance akin to the origin of the universe itself, borne from the nothingness from which came all matter and energy.
The great biologist Louis Pasteur claimed that life could come only from previous life: Omne vivum ex vivo. However, few modern biologists believe that life existed in the early days of our primordial planet, a seething ball of chemicals freshly cooked in the cauldrons of a primordial star. How did it start? Was it an inevitable result of zillions of collisions of atoms, likely to happen on other planets with Earth-like conditions? Or was it a unique occurrence, a one time event? And can physics and chemistry and biology ever give definitive answers to such questions?
Besides these profound scientific questions of origins, there is the philosophical and theological question of the materiality of life. Put your finger under a microscope, and you will see cells. Red blood cells, for example, look like red dimpled disks. Examine these cells with a higher-powered microscope, and you’ll see tiny hexagons, the molecules of hemoglobin. An even higher power microscope reveals intricate filigrees of oxygen and hydrogen atoms, carbon and nitrogen atoms clustered around an atom of iron. Is that what we are? Is that all that we are?
Until recent times, biologists divided into two camps on the question of life.
The so-called mechanists believe that a living creature is just so many atoms and molecules, microscopic pulleys and levers, chemicals and currents—all subject to the laws of chemistry and physics and biology. For that camp, the question of origins amounts to the structure and behavior of atoms and simple molecules, and the energies available in the primitive Earth. Vitalists, on the other hand, argue that there is a special quality of life—some immaterial or spiritual or transcendent force—that enables a jumble of tissues and chemicals to vibrate with life. That transcendent force would be beyond physical analysis or explanation. Some call it the soul. The ancient Greeks called it pneuma, meaning “breath” or “wind.” Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all hold that the breath of the soul can be imparted only by God.
Modern biologists are mechanists. In fact, an entire interdisciplinary field called synthetic biology is concerned with manufacturing and manipulating components of living systems—aided in part by the discovery of the structure of DNA in the early 1950s and the beginnings of molecular biology. Some synthetic biologists are reprogramming the DNA of microorganisms to produce drugs and batteries and new engineering devices. Others want to understand how life originated on Earth. Still others are attempting to create new forms of life from prior living organisms. Or life from completely nonliving material.
It is a young field. In the 1950s, chemists showed that electrical discharges (lightning) in a mixture of gases thought to represent the ancient atmosphere could produce amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. The first creation of a synthetic cell occurred in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The first hybrid gene, achieved by splicing together the genes of two different organisms, occurred in the early 1970s. The first synthesis of a complete set of genes from their chemical parts and injection into a host cell occurred in 2010. As important as they are, none of these accomplishments comes close to the creation of life from nonlife. However, given the historical momentum of science and the fortitude of the scientists involved, that result is probably only a matter of time. The first human-made life-form, created from scratch, will almost certainly be a single cell with a single gene, far simpler than a bacterium. But that will be a major advance.
Such a result would be the ultimate triumph of the mechanist view. Yet the idea that we may be nothing but material atoms and molecules deeply disturbs many of us. Putting aside for the moment theological considerations, the feeling of selfhood, of thinking and emotion, of self-awareness, of “I-ness” is so overwhelming, so absolutely unique, so impossible to explain, that it seems incomprehensible such a sensation could be rooted completely in material atoms and molecules. It seems impossible that we, and other living beings, could be nothing but material. Yet that is the axiom of the synthetic biologists, who are embarked on a project to create life from nonlife.
If they succeed, their success will reopen many deep questions. At the same time, the ability to create life from nonlife may represent the ultimate freedom of a living being. Not that we will have escaped the laws of nature. But we will have escaped the cosmic decree that living matter emerges from prior living matter in an inevitable chain, unknowing and autonomous, most of it utterly insensible but even the sentient organisms ignorant of the origins of their exquisite bodily machinery. Sometime in childhood, we become aware of ourselves as separate from the surrounding world, as conscious and thinking beings. But we do not remember our birth, or what came before. We understand only a fraction of the trillions of chemical and electrical processes taking place every moment under our skin. We do not know how and why the marvel of our lives, or any life, occurs. We can only accept what is given. If the synthetic biologists succeed in creating life from nonlife, we will be a rare substance in the universe that not only is aware of itself but also understands the secrets of its being.
It is quite possible that the first creation of a living cell from scratch will occur in the laboratory of Jack Szostak, professor of genetics at the Harvard Medical School and professor of chemistry and chemical biology at the Massachusetts General Hospital. Professor Szostak was born in the early 1950s, just at the time that Rosalind Franklin and Francis Crick and James Watson were making their momentous discoveries about DNA. Szostak grew up in various cities in Germany and Canada as his father, an aeronautical engineer with the Royal Canadian Air Force, was transferred from one posting to the next. For his early fascination with science, Szostak credits his engineer father, who built a basement lab for his son. “The experiments I conducted there often made use of remarkably dangerous chemicals that my mother was able to bring home from the company where she worked,” recalls Szostak. He also credits his father with his decision at an early age to become an academic. “My father was often unhappy with his job, chafing at both his superiors and his subordinates. This I am sure made me seek out the academic life for its more egalitarian aspects. I have never felt like I worked for a boss or had employees who worked for me, just colleagues who like me were interested in learning more about the world around us.”
In 1968, at the age of fifteen, young Szostak began his undergraduate studies at McGill. His particular engagement with biology was sparked by a summer program for undergraduates at the Jackson Laboratories on Mount Desert Island, off the coast of Maine, where he analyzed the thyroid hormones of mice. In the early 1970s, Szostak began his graduate studies at Cornell. There, he worked with the DNA of yeast. Over the next decade and a half, that work deepened and spread, culminating in Szostak’s discovery of how the vulnerable ends of yeast chromosomes, and indeed all chromosomes, are protected by molecules called “telomeres”—work for which he won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (shared with Elizabeth Blackburn and Carol Greider).
By the mid to late 1980s, the field of yeast biology was getting too congested for Szostak. “I had a growing feeling that my work in yeast was becoming less significant, in the sense that other people would inevitably end up doing the same experiments we were doing in a few months or years at the most,” he recalls. From the beginning of his career, Szostak had always tried to avoid direct competition with other scientists. So, still in his thirties, with his Nobel Prize–winning work already under his belt, he began shifting his focus to RNA (ribonucleic acid), a molecule very similar to DNA and thought to be its ancestor in the evolution of life. Since then, Szostak and the researchers in his lab have been at the forefront of the creation of life from nonlife. Some of their major achievements include the creation of cell membranes from simple chemicals and a demonstration of how these membranes could grow and divide under simple chemical and physical processes, and a partial understanding of how RNA can be replicated within a primitive surrounding membrane.
Biologists are not in complete agreement about when to declare a particular smidgeon of matter “alive.” In general, the requirements include some kind of surrounding membrane (what Szostak calls a “compartment”) to separate the organism from the outside world and to confine the most critical molecules in close proximity, the ability to utilize energy sources, the ability to grow, the ability to reproduce, and the ability to evolve. In a 2001 paper in the prominent journal Nature, Szostak and colleagues identified four vital ingredients of a minimal living cell: a compartment, an embedded molecule like RNA or DNA that is able to replicate, a means for that replication, and some kind of interaction between the compartment wall and the replicating molecule so that they can help each other in response to the forces of Darwinian evolution. What distinguishes Szostak’s work in this field from the work of many other synthetic biologists is that Szostak wants to create a living cell from scratch, using only the simple molecules present in the primordial Earth, what he calls “prebiotic” molecules. By contrast, most other labs start with complex molecules that have been snatched from existing life-forms and have already had the benefit of natural selection and evolution over hundreds of millions of years.
Although ambitious and laser focused, Szostak is exceptionally modest about his achievements. Near the beginning of his autobiographical statement upon receiving the Nobel in 2009, he says: “Although I have had some degree of success as a scientist, it is hard to say precisely why.” He is also exceptionally generous in giving credit and support to others. “One of the delights of the world of science,” he says, “is that it is filled with people of good will who are more than happy to assist a student or colleague by teaching a technique or discussing a problem.” He refers to his second graduate student, Andrew Murray, as “a brilliant and energetic student who was fun to talk with about any conceivable experiment.” About another of his students, he recalls, “I had the good fortune to ‘inherit’ one of [Harvard chemist Jeremy Knowles’s] graduate students, Jon Lorsch, who migrated to my lab and did outstanding work on ribozyme selections and mechanistic enzymology.” A photograph of Professor Szostak with his students in a quite plain-looking room at the Harvard Medical School shows twenty smiling young people, some standing, some kneeling, most wearing jeans. In the middle of this happy family is the professor. By his humble demeanor, he is one of them.
I visited Professor Szostak in his office and lab in July 2019. His office, on the fourth floor of the Richard B. Simches Research Center of the Massachusetts General Hospital, is a small room barely large enough to hold a small couch, a small table, a small desk piled high with papers and documents, and a bookshelf with biology books and bound volumes of his students’ theses. When I met him, he was wearing a sweat-stained blue linen shirt and rumpled khaki pants loosely drooping from his waist. He has thinning hair and wears glasses. He speaks in a soft, almost hesitant voice, clearly passionate about his work while at the same time not endowing any sentence with the slightest exaggeration or presumption of importance. “People get all tied up in knots about defining life,” he told me. “That doesn’t help us. I care about the process and pathway from simple to complex. Where along the way you draw the line and call the thing ‘alive’—different people draw the line at different places. If it can start evolving, I would call it alive.” Evolution and natural selection are powerful driving forces. Szostak points out that any biological molecule will naturally undergo mutations, some positive and some negative. Given the right chemical environment, evolution then happens automatically. “Once you have one element that has an advantage, there is a huge pressure to drive replication…When somebody figures it out [how life started on Earth], it’s got to be a bunch of simple things.” He smacked his hand against his head in a eureka gesture. “It happened all by itself on primitive Earth. It can’t be that hard.”
In 2003, Szostak and his colleagues demonstrated that a common mineral clay called montmorillonite, formed from volcanic ash and used in cat litter today, could accelerate the assembly of cell “compartments” needed for life using only the simple molecules available in the primordial Earth. Montmorillonite seems to be an extraordinary catalyst. It was already known that it could help assemble RNA molecules from their basic building blocks. Now, Szostak and his colleagues found that simple molecules called fatty acids, when placed in contact with the clay, bond together to form membranes. The membranes then automatically close up and assemble tiny fluid-filled sacs, or compartments, which could possibly contain replicating molecules like RNA or DNA. Furthermore, in the presence of the clay, these microscopic sacs grow all by themselves by incorporating other fatty acids. Evidently, the surface of the clay has special geometrical and chemical properties that catalyze these reactions. Szostak and his colleagues also showed that passing the tiny sacs through a material with small pores would cause them to divide, in a sense “reproducing.” Thus, he had demonstrated creation, growth, and reproduction of a cell compartment.
Almost immediately after his paper was published in Science, it was widely popularized in the press. For example, The New York Times published an article about the work titled “How Did Life Begin?” and Scientific American published an article titled “Clay Could Have Encouraged First Cells to Form.”
Szostak wanted to tell me a story about this discovery. After it was picked up by the news media, he received a “flood of emails” from fundamentalists saying they were pleased he had proven that God can create life from clay, just as mentioned in the sacred books. “I am not religious myself,” he said and smiled at the irony. “I hope that when we succeed, it will eventually seep into the culture that the creation of life is totally natural, and we don’t need to invoke anything magical or supernatural…What I don’t get is how religious people can say that they know how God did that.”
While we talked, several of Professor Szostak’s students and colleagues quietly worked in the lab just outside his office. His current research group consists of sixteen students and postdocs. The major part of the lab occupies part of a large room housing a dozen or so long shelves cluttered with various bottles and chemicals. Below the shelves are worktables. On one worktable I saw a computer screen, an open notebook and pen, and several Post-it notes stuck to the wall and shelf. Adjoining this large room are a few smaller rooms with mass spectrometers (which measure the ratio of mass to electrical charge of tiny particles and thus help identify them); centrifuges; an oxygen-free zone, contained within an airtight hood and used to simulate the oxygen-free atmosphere of the early Earth; and a sophisticated nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) machine to measure the structure of molecules. As I stood gaping at the NMR machine, Szostak mentioned that he would like to have two, as a backup when one of them is temporarily down.
Szostak and many other biologists who study the origin of life subscribe to a view called the “RNA world.” This concept, first proposed by biologist and biophysicist Alexander Rich in 1962, holds that the first replicating molecule in the early history of Earth was not DNA but RNA. The two molecules are chemical cousins. They differ in a few ways. In modern cells, most DNA is a double-stranded helix while most RNA is single-stranded; one of the four letters of the genetic alphabet used by the two molecules is different; and the backbones of the two molecules incorporate slightly different sugar molecules. (The sugar molecule found in DNA derives from the simpler sugar molecule in RNA, another reason why many biologists believe that RNA came first.) Both RNA and DNA store information for the reproduction of the organism. Unlike DNA, RNA has other duties in the cell. It reads the information on the DNA molecule and then carries that information to another part of the cell where proteins are made.
The RNA world hypothesis got a big boost in the early 1980s when biologists Thomas Cech and Sidney Altman independently showed that RNA was not simply a passive messenger of information but could catalyze reactions and help create molecules on its own. This discovery solved a long-standing chicken-and-egg-type conundrum: certain proteins are needed to make DNA, but DNA is needed to make those proteins. RNA could do both: store genetic information for the cell and also rebuild itself. RNA could be both the carrier of the map and the mapmaker.
Being single-stranded, RNA is more subject to attack and degradation by outside chemicals. It is not as stable as DNA. Over time, in the process of Darwinian evolution, RNA would have been replaced by DNA as the principal bank of genetic information. But in the beginning, according to RNA world, RNA might have been the principal molecule of replication.
Szostak believes that a primitive cell might not need much more in its innards than a strand of RNA and some simple chemicals to serve as raw construction materials. How that construction occurs is not yet understood—a major obstacle for understanding how to create life from nonlife. “In my view, the critical problem right now is to understand the chemistry that enabled the first mode of RNA replication,” says Szostak. In other words, exactly how does the replication molecule, carrying all the blueprints for the cell, replicate itself? Szostak says that it is easy to replicate RNA using protein enzymes (catalysts) and other complex molecules that have been developed over millions of years of evolution. But he wants to know how life began. He is trying to show how RNA replication could have happened on the primitive Earth, with only the simple molecules then in existence. “Our approach has a ways to go: so far, we can copy short stretches of an RNA template to generate a complementary strand in the form of an RNA double helix. However, our ability to copy RNA is limited to very short lengths, and we cannot yet do multiple cycles of copying, in other words, copy the copies. Indefinite replication within protocells is our goal, because we think that with replicating RNA inside replicating vesicles [membrane compartments], we would have a system capable of evolving in a Darwinian sense.”
The study of how life began on Earth, and the related attempt to create life from nonlife in the lab, raise all kinds of philosophical, theological, ethical, and social issues. Many of these issues have been anticipated in science fiction, in academia, and in religious conferences and institutions. But with the successes of Szostak and other synthetic biologists, these matters are receiving new attention.
In one episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Commander Data fractures a part of himself and stares at the bare tangle of wires and computer chips protruding from his wrist. Although Data is a machine, viewers have come to regard him as human. He looks human. He acts toward other characters with compassion and sweetness. He appears to know right from wrong. Something unsettles us about this scene, not so much because Data is hurt, but because he, and we, suddenly see inside his mechanism. The secret of his being hangs open in the air. All the complexities of his bodily actions and thoughts, the subtle depths of his feelings, the seemingly infinite mysteries of a living being, have been graphically reduced to so many amperes of current flowing through these protruding wires, to particular patterns of zeros and ones within these computer components. We feel affronted. We feel some kind of violation of the natural order of things.
In our age of rampant technological advance—with small boxes that can transmit our words and images over vast distances through space, with other devices that improve our hearing and sight, with drugs that alter our thoughts and personalities, all of it human-made—the lines between the “natural” and the “unnatural” have become blurred. One might argue that since we human beings are “natural” and our brains and their capacities evolved “naturally,” then anything we make is “natural.” Others disagree. What are the differences, if any, between an organism created in Jack Szostak’s lab and an organism found in the moist soil under a rock?
Micah Greenstein, a prominent rabbi in Memphis, Tennessee, says unequivocally that an organism created in a lab would not have a soul. “Soul is the life force within all living beings which cannot be quantified,” says Rabbi Greenstein. “It is the animating feature of all life-forms. Dogs have souls. They cry and offer compassion and love like humans. Human souls are gifted with the ability to take care of other life-forms and the planet itself. Were we able to construct a new life, I believe no process could ‘breathe’ into a proto-human or proto-dog the soul of which I speak. Call it personality, call it the unique signature of each human being. In a beautiful midrash, the rabbis speak of the difference between a coin creator and God. A coin maker puts the same mark on each shekel and they are exactly the same. God breathes ‘soul’ into every human, the same gift of spirit in every human being, yet no two people are exactly alike. Each is a unique signature of the One.”
A related concern for theists is that the human creation of living organisms seemingly transgresses into territory and knowledge reserved for God. This concern has a long history. In Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667)—written in the age of Newton and the beginnings of modern science—when Adam questions the angel Raphael about celestial mechanics, Raphael offers some vague hints and then says that “the rest / From Man or Angel the great Architect / Did wisely to conceal, and not divulge / His secrets to be scann’d by them who ought / Rather admire.” In 1996, when the British embryologist Dr. Ian Wilmut cloned a lamb (named Dolly) from an adult sheep’s cell, it was undoubtedly a success for science, but ethical and theological alarms sounded all over the world. The sheep’s human manipulators were described by The New York Times as having “pried open one of the most forbidden—and tantalizing—doors of modern life.” Cloning is a complex issue, and one has to distinguish between therapeutic cloning (to treat illnesses) and reproductive cloning (to produce new organisms). On the subject of human cloning, most religious groups are adamantly opposed, or highly suspicious. But even with Dolly, many were disturbed when the achievement was announced. Dozens of articles had the phrase “playing God” in the title. Even today, according to a recent Gallup survey, 66 percent of Americans think it is “morally wrong” to clone animals, while 31 percent say it is “morally acceptable.”
Ruth Faden, professor of biomedical ethics at Johns Hopkins University and founder of the Berman Institute of Bioethics at that university, frames the question of human-made organisms in terms of their “moral status.” An entity’s “moral status” determines its rights and value and sets parameters for how we human beings are morally obligated to treat it. The term has gained currency in the twentieth century with the abortion debate and questions about whether a human embryo has moral status. Professor Faden discussed the issue with me specifically in relation to synthetic biology. “Does it matter how life is formed?” she said. “Certainly it matters scientifically. But does it matter for the entity that is created? Should it be treated any differently from something we just found under a rock? For some people, in the ethical domain there is a big line between organic and inorganic entities. Living matter has value in ways that inorganic matter does not. There is a huge debate over who has moral status.” Faden says that for people of faith, “we may be redefining where the spark of life is.” She adds that “for many nonreligious people, it is not the soul that matters but sentience,” suggesting that the dividing line between deserving some level of moral status and not is whether the organism has feelings and consciousness. Consciousness and self-awareness are not easy to pin down, but wherever one draws the line it is likely that at some point in the future biologists will have the ability to create a sentient living being.
At least for the creators and writers of Star Trek, Commander Data has moral status. Did the creature brought to life by Victor Frankenstein have moral status? Does a computer with the ability to learn and speak have moral status? In Rabbi Greenstein’s view, none of these entities would have a soul, but some of them would be sentient, however one defines that word. The Buddhist monk Yos Hut Khemacaro, who played a major role in rebuilding the monkhood in Cambodia in the 1980s and 1990s, told me that Buddhists, who do not believe in a soul, have no problem with human-made life-forms and would accord them “morality, value, and dignity if we see the same characteristics as ‘natural’ living beings.”
Some observers place synthetic biology within the larger context of our exponentially advancing technology in general and the need for restraint. Richard Hayes, a social and political advocate and former executive director of the Center for Genetics and Society in Berkeley, says, “We’re at or very near a cusp in the history of humankind. It’s no longer a question of the pros and cons of this one new technology or that particular application. I believe we need to take a huge, deep breath, take a big step back and give ourselves the time and space within which to assess where we are, how we got here and where we want to go, along the entire set of social, political and technological dimensions. We need to draw lines. If we allow scientists to create a single living cell, for example one very effective at pulling CO2 from the atmosphere, why not allow creation of two-celled organisms that do so even more effectively, or of 200- or 2,000-celled organisms that remove pollutants from the ocean? Why not fish-like or rat-like organisms that possess certain human cognitive abilities and can be trained for many useful purposes? And if that’s OK, why not allow the creation of human-ape hybrids to perform even more useful tasks?”
Certainly, there are safety issues. In the early 1970s, Paul Berg at Stanford University produced a hybrid loop of DNA containing DNA from two different organisms, a virus called SV40 and the common bacterium E. coli. Berg was planning on inserting this human-made recombinant DNA back into E. coli. When concerns were raised about the unforeseen consequences of creating an organism never before seen in nature, Berg suspended his experiments. At that point, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences appointed a committee to study the safety issues of recombinant DNA research. After the committee published its report in 1974, the scientists recommended a worldwide deferment on certain kinds of recombinant DNA research until the risks were better understood. “There is a serious concern that some of the artificial recombinant DNA molecules could prove biologically hazardous,” wrote the committee. Today, forty-five years later and with guidelines in place, recombinant DNA technologies have been enormously useful in producing new vaccines, protein therapies such as human insulin, blood-clotting factors, and gene therapy.
A more recent development occurred in 2010, when J. Craig Venter and colleagues created a set of genes that were a variant of already existing bacterial genes and then inserted them into a bacterium that had had its own DNA removed. The synthetic genes then took over the bacterium. The accomplishment triggered a presidential investigative commission, under President Obama. In its report, titled “The Ethics of Synthetic Biology and Emerging Technologies,” the commission wrote: “The Venter Institute’s research and synthetic biology are in the early stages of a new direction in a long continuum of research in biology and genetics. The announcement last May [of Venter’s achievement], although extraordinary in many ways, does not amount to creating life as either a scientific or a moral matter…In order to provide benefits to human conditions and the environment, the Commission thinks it imprudent either to declare a moratorium on synthetic biology until all risks can be determined and mitigated, or to simply ‘let science rip,’ regardless of the likely risks…The Commission instead proposes a middle ground—an ongoing system of prudent vigilance that carefully monitors, identifies, and mitigates potential and realized harms over time.”
In 1981, several years before his death, the great theoretical physicist Richard Feynman did an interview for the BBC television program Horizon, in which he was asked a question about his Nobel Prize. Feynman’s reply: “I don’t see that it makes any point that someone in the Swedish Academy decides that this work is noble enough to receive a prize—I’ve already got the prize. The prize is the pleasure of finding the thing out, the kick in the discovery, the observation that other people use it [my work], those are the real things…” Jack Szostak, too, has a Nobel. And he is undoubtedly aware of many of the theological, ethical, and philosophical aspects of his work. He is also aware of the medical and business opportunities of synthetic biology in general. (In the 1990s, he and two colleagues founded a start-up biotechnology company to produce new kinds of proteins. “Although the company was not a business success, it was a very interesting and educational experience,” he recalls.) But what drives Szostak and many other basic scientists—what keeps them up late at night in the lab or at their work desk, so that they can think of nothing else, sometimes to the neglect of their family and friends—is what drove Feynman: “the pleasure of finding the thing out.” How did life begin on our planet? What did the first replicating cells look like? How do we create a living thing from nonliving material, life from nonlife—a squirming, growing, evolving, reproducing thing from simple chemicals? Few questions could be more profound. Yet it is not only the profundity of the questions. It is the primal pleasure of finding things out, and the incomparable thrill of being the first person to understand something about nature.
As I talked with Professor Szostak about his research, despite the quiet of his voice I could hear the passion. In his autobiography, he wrote these words about his work to create primitive replicating molecules (which he calls modified nucleic acids or genetic polymers): “It is thrilling to me to see people in my lab developing new approaches to the synthesis of modified nucleic acids, but the suspense is almost unbearable as we await the results of template-directed polymerization experiments. From our current vantage point, it is not clear whether there will be many solutions to the problem of chemically replicating genetic polymers, or just one, or none, but in any case it is an exciting quest.”
There is one significant way in which Szostak’s pleasure in science differs from Feynman’s. As a theoretical physicist, Feynman worked alone. By contrast, Szostak and most biologists today work in groups, surrounded by a team of graduate students, postdocs, and other colleagues. It is a more social enterprise. And that companionship provides Szostak, and other higher life-forms, with an additional pleasure. Near the end of my visit with Professor Szostak, he summed up the last decade: “What I love doing the most is talking to other colleagues, students, and postdocs. One of the best things about having a lab is helping young people develop.”