Lee Cronin: The Chemistry of Life ​(#195)

Lee Cronin was born in the UK and was fascinated with science and
technology from an early age getting his first computer and
chemistry set when he was 8 years old. This is when he first
started thinking about programming chemistry and looking for
inorganic aliens. He went to the University of York where he
completed both a degree and PhD in Chemistry and then on to do post
docs in Edinburgh and Germany before becoming a lecturer at the
Universities of Birmingham, and then Glasgow where he has been
since 2002 working up the ranks to become the Regius Professor of
Chemistry in 2013 aged 39. He has one of the largest
multidisciplinary chemistry-based research teams in the world,
having raised over $35 M in grants and current income of $15 M. He
has given over 300 international talks and has authored over 350
peer reviewed papers with recent work published in Nature, Science,
and PNAS. He and his team are trying to make artificial life forms,
find alien life, explore the digitization of chemistry, understand
how information can be encoded into chemicals and construct
chemical computers. http://www.chem.gla.ac.uk/cronin/ Audible is
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“impossible” to 500-500 00:00:00 Intro 00:01:52 Is chirality
necessary for life? 00:07:28 What does chemistry tell us about the
origin of life? What is life? 00:13:04 What is life? 00:19:14 What
came first, chirality or life? 00:23:05 Why is "folding" necessary
in biochemistry? 00:25:54 The debate about life between intelligent
design and science. 00:38:55 How do you respond to critics of your
methods? Where Miller-Urey went wrong. 01:01:33 What would you put
in your ethical will? 01:02:54 What would you put on a billion-year
time capsule (like the monoliths in 2001)? 01:04:27 What advice
would you give to your younger self? Watch my most popular videos:
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