Please join us in-person and online for the annual Burton Lecture at King's College London with John Sutherland.

John Sutherland, Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology, will explore one of science's most profound questions: how did chemistry transform into biology at the origin of life? And what does it tell us about where we came from? The lecture will showcase recent research about how the hellish conditions of early Earth could answer these questions.

You're invited to join us after the lecture for a drinks reception.

Who is this event for?

This event is for anyone with an interest in chemistry and its associations with the origin of life. Experience of studying or working in this field is not required to understand the lecture.

Agenda

17:00 - Opening remarks

17:05 - Lecture by John Sutherland

17:50 - Q&A

18:05 - Drinks reception

19:00 - Event close

Origins of Life Systems Chemistry

How can chemistry morph into biology? This is the key question about the origin of life, be it on our planet several billion years ago, or elsewhere and so we need to think about chemistry in the context of planetary science if we want to know where we came from and whether or not we are likely to be alone in the Universe.

We don't see life starting in any of the diverse environments now found on Earth, so the chances are that it was a different environment on early Earth that was conducive to life. Furthermore, the chemistry used by biology to fabricate its various components is by and large hopelessly inefficient in the absence of enzyme catalysts, so we need to look for different chemistry that can make the same componentry efficiently without enzymes.

One approach is to guess at the environment and then use laboratory simulation to investigate its chemistry. The problem with this is the guesswork – there were presumably many different environments on early Earth and it is not obvious what chemistry they might be associated with. An alternative approach is to explore chemistry in a pretty much unconstrained way to try and find out if all the molecules needed to kick-start biology can be made under similar conditions. If they can and the conditions required correspond to a particular environment on early Earth then that environment is strongly implicated and can further guide chemical investigations. In this lecture, I will present the results of this latter approach and demonstrate how hellish conditions on Hadean-Archean Earth could have set the stage for the transition from chemistry to biology.

Speaker bio

John Sutherland studied Chemistry at the University of Oxford, and then spent time as a Kennedy Scholar at Harvard with Jeremy Knowles. Upon returning to the UK, he carried out his doctoral work with Jack Baldwin at Oxford, and then stayed in Oxford first as a Junior Research Fellow and then as a University Lecturer in Organic Chemistry. In 1998 he took a chair in Biological Chemistry at Manchester, and in 2010 moved to the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge as a Group Leader.

He is interested in chemistry associated with the origin of life, and, along with his research group, has made contributions in the area of prebiotic nucleotide, amino acid and lipid synthesis and RNA chemistry.

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Livestream:

• This event will be livestreamed from 17:00 to 18:05.

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