Lee Cronin explains the potential benefits of evolving inorganic materials
Lee Cronin is the Gardiner professor of chemistry at the University of Glasgow. He also runs the Cronin Group, which is involved in work to "construct complex functional molecular architectures that are not based on biologically derived building blocks". Earlier this year, he gave a talk at TEDGlobal in Edinburgh.
What is inorganic biology?
Inorganic biology is my attempt to try to ask a very basic question about the nature of matter in the universe: can we do biology outside of organic chemistry?
You think biology is defined by evolution?
Yes, evolution occurs in biology but it doesn't occur anywhere else in the natural world. What I mean by evolution is this idea of survival of the fittest and adaptation by replication or birth of offspring. Evolution is a very good way to make complex systems that are robust and function in an environment. Darwin's theory of evolution is in fact a special theory of evolution because it only applies to biology, it only applies to carbon-based life. But four-and-a-half billion years ago there was no life. So I wanted to ask the question: what is the most basic unit of stuff that can independently undergo evolution? You could probably tell me the answer…
Bacteria?
Exactly, a biologist might say bacteria are too complex but basically they are single-cell creatures of some description. And so when you set up that you come up with three questions, which are: what is life?; is biology special?; is matter evolvable? If we answer them in reverse order: we know matter is evolvable because biology is made of matter and it needs chemistry material to do its stuff. And if we could make general stuff outside of biology evolve, then we would know how special it is. And then that would lead us to question what is life.
So what would be an example of the general stuff?
All stuff that we have on Earth that isn't replicating.
So you would like to turn the material world into the living world?
We can use the phenomenon of evolution to improve stuff as well as discovering new materials, devices or systems. And that has a profound consequence in itself: not only can we develop a whole new technology, but we might be able to understand how we got here in the first place.
Even a few decades ago, scientists thought that life was incredibly difficult to assemble from nothing and that we were a once-in-a-universe achievement. But actually I think, and I am not alone in this thought, that the emergence of life on Earth is as probable as the emergence of life elsewhere. And so there are many life-forms in the universe but on Earth we are constrained by our bias of carbon and organic chemistry because organic chemistry works brilliantly here. If we were able to prove our assertion that biology is a general phenomenon, not just based on the organic, then we know there is probably other life in the universe.
What I am saying is that all universes can come alive, they just do it in different ways. And in fact in this universe there will be life based on iron or silicon – we just can't conceive of it.
How far have you got in trying to prove biology is a general phenomenon?
