Jack Szostak, a scientist at Harvard Medical School, is trying to build a new kind of life. It will contain no DNA or proteins. Instead, it will based on RNA, a surprisingly mysterious molecule essential to our own cells. Szostak may reach his goal in a few years. But his creatures wouldn’t be entirely new. It’s likely that RNA-based life was the first life to exist on Earth, some 4 billion years ago, eventually giving rise to the DNA-based life we know. It just took a clever species like our own to recreate it.
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On the east coast, we’re bracing for the howling emergence of a massive brood of 17-year cicadas in a couple weeks. Here’s a nice piece in the Washington Post about the evolution of this strange life history.
There are only a few places on the surface of Earth where you can find really old rocks–and by old, I mean 3.5 billion years old or older. The rest have gotten sucked down into the planet’s interior, cooked, scrambled with other rocks, and pushed back up to the growing margins of continental plates. The few formations that have survived are mere fragments, some the size of a football field, some a house. And generally they’re are mess, shot through with confusion such as intrusions of lava from more recent volcanoes. Paleontologists are drawn and repulsed by these rocks, because they may hold the oldest clues about life on Earth, or lifeless mirages that only look like clues.
My book Soul Made Flesh looks at the roots of neuroscience in the 1600s. The first neurologists saw their work as a religious mission; they recognized that it was with the brain that we made moral judgments. In order to finish the book, I looked for living neuroscientists who carry on those early traditions today. I was soon fascinated by the work of Joshua Greene, a philosopher turned neuroscientist at Princeton. Greene is dissecting the ways in which people decide what is right and wrong. To do so, he poses moral dilemmas to them while he scans their brains. I mentioned Greene briefly in Soul Made Flesh and then went into more detail in a profile I wrote recently. Greene and I will join forces tomorrow on the show “New York and Company” on WNYC tomorrow around 12:30 pm. You can listen to us on the radio or on the web.
John Maynard Smith has died.