Speaker 1: It's great to be joined today by Nick Lane, who's professor of evolutionary
biochemistry at University College London, also the author of five books, some of which
I've read, including Transformer The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death.
Really appreciate you being on today.
Thank you.
Speaker 4: Well, thank you for the invitation.
Pleasure to be here.
Speaker 1: So I think maybe to to kind of frame the conversation.
Certain areas of science are studied in particular ways.
Biology, for example, has increasingly looked at genetic information as one particular way
that we study the origins of life, intelligent life, consciousness, whatever the the approach
to that study has been a particular way over the last several decades.
Do you think, generally speaking, that in these fields science is focusing on the right
questions and the right approaches?
Or is there sort of like a paradigm shift that you think would be more useful in answering
some of the key questions we don't yet have answers to?
Speaker 4: Well, I do think a paradigm shift would be useful.
That's not to say everything that people have been studying is wrong.
You know, it's it's taken us a long way down the path.
But the danger is that if you think it's only about genes and information and so on, then
you kind of miss the broader point that there's more to life than just genetic information.
It's kind of a statement of the obvious, but but it's amazing how kind of how much tunnel
vision you can have in research that people know effectively where the funding is going
to come from, the kind of things that will attract funding, the kind of things that you
can do.
A lot of science is about what you can physically go and do in the lab, what you know, what
technical equipment do you have to go and explore this question?
And then I have to say, science is intrinsically quite conservative.
And any ideas that seem to be too far outside the box tend to be squashed.
You know, and there's lots of ideas outside the box.
And probably a fairly high proportion of them, probably including some of my own, ought to
be squashed.
You know, you don't squash them without thinking about it.
You squash them after after, you know, testing them, trying it a little bit just to see where
it takes you.
Speaker 1: Well, that's very interesting because there are some in the science communication
community, I guess we would call it, for lack of a better term, who often repeat and like
to say that one of the great differences between science and religion is that within organized
religion, dissenting views are often squashed or dismissed.
You become a pariah of sorts, in contrast to the scientific world where actually being
able to debunk or disprove previously held beliefs is greatly revered and celebrated
and welcomed.
And there's great celebrity available to scientists if they're able to do that.
Is that only true in some sense or in some cases?
Speaker 4: There is a lot of truth in that, which is to say I won't speak for the for
the religious side of it, but for the scientific side.
Yes, I think most scientists most of the time set out to try and do something new, to try
and, you know, overturn the applecart to some extent.
But the whole system of peer review, the whole system of kind of double checking everything
and making sure that this is bona fide, that this is solid research, that you've not missed
something obvious, that you've you've got all the controls and all this stuff.
Well, who does the peer review?
The people who do the peer review or the people who have, in effect, already established their
careers within establishing the current paradigm?
And so as a group of people, they are, by nature, I mean, kind of almost by definition,
relatively conservative.
And if you really do come up with a completely new paradigm, then you really will overturn
a lot of people's work.
And so being revolutionary is not an easy thing to do.
I'm not saying I'm revolutionary.
I think I'm just talking plain common sense, to be honest with you.
But.
But but this is this is something that anybody who is genuinely has transformative ideas
in science will come up against the conservative ness of peer review.
And it's, as I say, probably nine out of ten people with what look like mad ideas will
really have ideas that will turn out not to be true.
And it's probably right that they don't get too far.
But one out of those ten maybe, you know, genuinely brilliant, a genius who who's it?
And they face kind of problems with the social construction of science.
Yes.
Speaker 1: To talk a little more specifically about one of your books, Transformer The Deep
Chemistry of Life and Death.
As we kind of mentioned at the start of the conversation, there's been a lot of focus
on genetic information in the field of biology.
And one of the areas that you explore, again, to the extent that I hopefully understood
it somewhat correctly in the book, is about metabolism and.
Looking at sort of the cellular level.
And when we talk about life and death, really looking at what is it that is happening there?
Now, we've talked to scientists who specialize in human longevity, for example, and they've
explained in a way that is relevant to that particular field the idea of over time, the
body losing the ability to replace cells of different types, a deterioration of sorts
that that takes place, etc., that's specific to the field of longevity.
And the language sort of serves that, that purpose.
Can you talk a little bit about the angle that you take here and really this process
that's at the core that you describe?
Speaker 4: Yeah, what I'm really interested in is, is how energy works in biology, because
it's not it's not as you might imagine, it is actually electrical.
I suppose a lot of people might immediately think it's electrical.
If you think about Frankenstein's monster or something, you have an electric shock and
off they go.
And we are all our cells inside ourselves.
We have these things called mitochondria.
They're often called the power packs of cells, and they have a they have an electrical charge
across their membrane, which is a, you know, a trivial charge.
We're talking 150, 200 millivolts.
But if you are to shrink yourself down to the size of a molecule and kind of stand next
to the membrane, the membrane so thin is five millionths of a millimeter in thickness over
nanometers thick that the actual strength of the field that you would experience if
you were there is about 30 million volts per meter, which is equivalent to a bolt of lightning.
So this is what's keeping us alive.
And nobody imagined until a few decades ago.
This is not new information, but a few decades ago it came as really quite a shock to discover
that effectively life is powered by electrical charges and electrical fields across membranes.
And so for me, the interesting question is why?
How did that get going?
It's quite a complex system.
What happened at the Origin of Life?
This is conserved across all of life.
And also, if we look across the whole 4 billion year history of life on earth, it's pretty
weird as well.
What we actually see is the first 2 billion years, it's just bacteria and really nothing
else.
And actually, if you think about it from the point of view of bacteria that are still there,
they're still just bacteria.
And so we have a 4 billion year history of life on earth, which is just bacteria.
And then at one point, which is to say all the evidence suggests at one point you you
have the emergence, what looks like quite an abrupt emergence in geological terms of
our own type of cell, what is called eukaryotic cells, or that means a cell with a nucleus,
and the nucleus is where we put our DNA in the genes.
So we have the same cell type that plants do and, you know, mushrooms, fungi and so
on do and large single celled critters, things like amoeba.
They also have the same cell structure.
Now, if you think if you think about, you know, we know we've got all of these genes,
sequences from the history of life, from bacteria all around the world.
And what it tells us is that the bacteria and another group that look a lot like them
called Archaea, have basically explored the kind of gene sequence space up all the possibilities
that you could have across all of evolution from exploring different gene sequences.
They've done that much better than other types of cell have done, eukaryotic cells have,
and yet somehow they got stuck in this rut.
They remain simple in their morphology.
They're not simple in their genetics or their biochemistry, but they're simple in their
size and their shapes and, you know, the kind of things going on inside.
And so it seems, I would say, that says they're not limited by genetics, they're not limited
by the searching of sequence space, they're limited by something else.
And that's something I think is the structure, because what all eukaryotes have in common
is they they they swallowed a bacterium 2 billion years ago, which went on to become
these power packs, emoticons with this powerful electrical charge across all the membranes.
So effectively they internalized respiration in a compartment which which allowed them
to scale up, become large and complex, and more or less get beyond the constraints that
energy has.
So obviously cells need energy, but not many people have thought about, well, how is it
provided?
And what we actually have is we have genes in our mitochondria and genes in our nucleus.
You need both sets of genes to control this electrical charge.
And that's that's a kind of a shift in cell structure, which changed the whole history
of evolution and everything that's possible.
And if we look for life on other planets and you think, are we going to find the same kind
of things?
Are we going to find people?
Are we going to find intelligent aliens?
Whatever it may be, the likelihood is we'll find bacteria for exactly the same reasons
that the Earth was dominated by bacteria for most of its history.
Speaker 1: When we think forward based on this framework, you know, I recently read
the book Precipice by Toby Ord.
Which looks at some of the more, I guess we would say, anthropogenic risks to humanity.
And he sort of goes through nuclear war, climate change, etc., and kind of frames the conversation
in from what we know, here's roughly how long species last.
Here's roughly what we think about mammalian species and takes sort of that approach to
how long might Homo sapiens last if we were to not destroy ourselves?
But it's a very socially informed kind of perspective when you think about the future
of Homo sapiens.
Is that side the one that seems most predictive, or is what we're talking about here, quite
literally, how cells get their energy and the waste of cells, which do you think as
humanity continues to would presumably advance technologically, will bear a greater weight
on what eventually happens to humans?
Speaker 4: Well, I mean, I, I fear for the next phase of human history.
I mean, we are very capable of doing this up badly and effectively, eliminating ourselves
from the planet.
Now, we will not, under any circumstances, eliminate life from the planet.
I suppose a full scale nuclear Armageddon might just do it, but even then there'll be
plenty of bacteria left, I'm sure, down in the crust and so on, and probably plenty of
eukaryotes down there as well.
So this transition from just a bacteria to 2 to 2 eukaryotic cells, I don't think we'd
have to go through that again.
And we've had, you know, major mass extinctions in the past where whereas 70, 80, 90% of of
species get wiped out, you move the clock forward by five, 10 million years and you
have a fully vibrant planet again.
So really what we're in danger of doing is destroying ourselves and everything we care
about.
And and then the planet will readjust.
And in 10 million years, it'll just be without us.
Would we get back?
All the majesty that we see around us is hard to say.
It depends just how effective we are in wiping everything else out.
So that's my biggest fear because there are tipping points and it's it's all very well
to say we should be optimistic we can fix any problem we put our minds to.
I would agree with that.
But we need the political will, we need the political governance.
And, you know, we're also capable of scuppering the best laid plans that humanity can come
up with.
And it may be we just leave it too late beyond beyond some tipping point.
So that's the biggest threat to humanity.
It doesn't matter how long mammalian species might normally last, we can do ourselves in
within the next 20 years or something.
Speaker 1: We're in a special, unique situation now.
Speaker 4: Really think we really are unique in the sense that I don't think any other
species beyond well, not even a virus could take out the entire planet in the way that
we're capable of doing.
So I don't know that it's necessarily helpful to think in general terms about the future.
I think we need to fix very specific problems now.
But if if we're thinking about, you know, if we do go into those general terms and think
about, well, can we, for example, solve lifespans so that we live indefinitely?
I think it will be difficult.
What I mean, there's two there's two aspects in biology that says it's possible.
One of them is that life itself is effectively immortal in the sense that there is an unbroken
chain of cells that go right back to the origin of life.
And those cells were metabolically active all the way through.
So so there's no necessity.
That damage accumulates and overcomes everything.
And then there are some, you know, things like flatworms and so on.
There's a there's a few fairly simple animals that are, in effect, immortal and can live
indefinitely, but they're usually pretty simple.
And the things that we most care about are, you know, our minds and our minds are incredibly
delicate structures made up of sign up trillions of synaptic connections.
And to preserve those is a is a very difficult thing to do.
And the decision evolution is made historically, if you like, is how much effort do I want
to put into the preservation of the organism compared to the replication of the organism?
And the decision for humans is, well, you know, 70, 80, 90 years, that allows you time
to have a few kids and look after them and even the grandparents can help look after
them, whatever it may be.
This is a kind of an evolutionary bargain, if you like, in the bargain says you have
a limited lifespan because this is all we're going to invest in your own prolongation as
an organism.
So we need to know the kind of the details of the small print that says, here's why you
here's why your life is coming to an end.
And see if we can fix that.
A lot of people wouldn't want to fix that.
I think it would be quite difficult in any case to do it.
So it's not it's not if you like, a threat in the immediate future.
I don't think, though, you could talk to other people who think that we already have people
on this planet who are going to live to a thousand or something.
Well.
Speaker 1: Short.
Short of that.
And I've interviewed some of those people.
Yeah.
Aubrey de Gray has been saying for 20 years, I think that the first person to live to 1000
is live in the limited time we have left.
It's almost cliche because it's so repeated now and sometimes things get repeated.
And do we do they really make sense?
But there's this idea that the best we can hope to do with standard human bodies is about
120 or 125 years, and that's beyond.
Speaker 4: Maximum human lifespan.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
And so that generally makes sense to you that until we really start making modifications
that make us not quite human, that's going to be a very difficult upper limit to get
to get beyond.
Speaker 4: I think it will be very difficult.
Yes.
I'm not saying it's not possible, but.
But but it will be it will be difficult.
Yes.
And I think it'll take us a while longer.
I don't think we understand biology nearly well enough yet to get beyond that limit personally.
Speaker 1: Right.
We've been speaking with Nick Lane, professor of Evolutionary Biochemistry at University
College London.
We'll link to a number of his books, including Transformer, The Deep Chemistry of Life and
Death.
I really appreciate your time today.
Speaker 4: Thank you.
It was a pleasure.