My Vision for the Laboratory for Origins and Astrobiology Research at Purdue - Part III: The Science

I wanted to finish off this blog post series by discussing the science that I envision my lab doing, but I felt a bit conflicted about it. Not because I worry about anyone stealing my ideas—I really don’t care about that. It’s more that I don’t want to constrain my lab’s research goals too strictly. Scientific exploration requires freedom. Here’s what I mean:

In the origins of life community, most labs study one of two dominant hypotheses: the warm little pond / information first hypothesis, or the hydrothermal vent / metabolism first hypothesis. (There are also a few fringe hypotheses I won’t mention here.) I’ve been performing research relevant to the former hypothesis for the past 9 years, and intend to continue researching this hypothesis in my lab at Purdue. However, this hypothesis could be totally wrong! And, so could the latter! And I love that about science: we can admit that we do not have the answers yet.

So while I can safely say that my lab will study the origins of life on Earth, and that we’ll focus on surface environments (for now), I’m leaving a lot of wiggle room for innovative ideas.

What we really need to do as a community, in order to solve the puzzle of the origin of life, is literally demonstrate life emerging in the lab. And if you read this and think, “but what if you create life in the lab and it becomes invasive and destroys all other life on Earth?” Don’t worry. Like first life on Earth, it will be really bad at replicating. It won’t have our fancy genetic code or enzymes to effectively and swiftly reproduce like us. It will be a really poor, under-evolved lifeform, that will die as soon as we shut off our experiment.

It’s important to recognize the assumptions in this pursuit, which are 1) that the recipe for life is out there, ripe for discovery, and, 2) that there are ways to speed up the process of creating life in the lab from what may have taken millions of years to occur on early Earth naturally. The first assumption is a pretty safe bet, given everything we’ve discovered so far about planets and evolution, but the second one worries me sometimes.

So, this is the theme that will be the basis of our experimental and theoretical work in the Laboratory for Origins and Astrobiology Research (LOAR). But we aren’t some sort of golden knights of science. Demonstrating the emergence of life is very hard and it will take a community to solve. We must build on the knowledge gained by the countless research groups that have worked on this problem for the last several decades. The best thing we can do as a lab is to work with the community and try to make valuable contributions to this greater goal. Basically, our goal as an individual lab is not to solve the origin of life, but to make concrete steps towards finding the answer.

What tools will LOAR use to make these steps? The first major tool is a laboratory experiment demonstrating the atmospheric and surface prebiotic chemistry of Hadean terrestrial environments. The Hadean, we suppose, is the period in time when Earth first became habitable, approximately 4.5 to 4.0 billion years ago. The apparatus will couple early Earth atmospheric photochemistry with surface wet-dry cycle chemistry, and will make use of a vacuum flow system, spark discharges, and heating/cooling. Biomolecule analysis will be performed using an Orbitrap Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometer that Purdue has graciously offered to buy LOAR as part of my startup grant. And, there will be theoretical modeling to place our experiments in the correct atmospheric context for the time period we’re studying.

If this all sounds exciting to you, and you’re interested in collaborating or pursuing a PhD in my lab, shoot me an e-mail! I’d love to chat!