life on earth goes way back but how did it begin and why here some believe it arrived on a meteorite others claim it began in a warm pond on early Earth in 1953 one scientist shook the world when he proposed an answer primordial soup but was his theory correct now researchers from Denmark to Hawaii are racing to understand how life may have begun by creating it themselves each hopes to be the first to find the origin of [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] life three teams of scientists from around the world are attempting a revolutionary first producing life from scratch in their Labs DrSteen rasmason is the team leader in Denmark it's very good we mix organic and inorganic components a little bit like The Alchemist in the old days trying to make gold we we try to make materials self-organized in such a way that it's able to become alive in in Hawaii biochemist David deer believes the key to life is to find out if DNA can assemble on its own outside of a cell and if we're really lucky we will see some synthetic reactions go on where small molecules join up to become larger molecules and that would be the most exciting result of all and at Harvard DrJack s Stack's team is trying to install a working genetic code into a primitive cell we know how to make these go through multiple cycles of growth and division so really the big step is combining that with some genetic material that's also replicating at the same time theirs is a race to unlock the very key to our world but to figure out how life begins scientists first need to find evidence of when it began geologist Minik Rosen has come to Greenland to find Clues to Life's Beginnings he searches the ancient rocks beneath the vast ice sheet preserved for over 3 billion years these rocks are among the oldest in the world archives of early Earth they're exposed for just a few weeks during the summer when snow and ice temporarily Retreat so rosing has a short time to collect samples Before ice reclaims the land he begins his search at a remote place called isua he's on the lookout for unique rocks called pillow lavas these rounded rocks formed when magma erupted and cooled on the ancient ocean floor over 3 billion years ago when you walk out of the helicopter you can see these pillow-shaped objects and and when we look at these sediments that settled on on top of the pillow lavas they're also similar to sediments you find in the oceans today so that puts us that gives us an idea of where we were at that time on on the planet we out in the oceans Earth's early seabed was pockmarked by spewing hot magma and it's still happening today when that 2,000 de molten rock hits the cold ocean water it cools rapidly creating a rounded Rocky shell a pillow shape where sediments eventually collect these ancient sedimentary remains are just what Drrosing and his team are after they could contain evidence of life's Origins so what is it exactly we're looking for now the origin of life right so that out crop down there is is the outcrop that has the evidence for the earliest life on this planet wow the team will secure samples not only from the surface but also more than 300 ft below where where would the drill go down as you start right here we could have it so that your casing would be started here yeah so the drill would probably it's right there oh it's right there some place a core drill will extract 1. 1 tons of rock samples using a 115 horsepower diesel engine an engine large enough to run a bulldozzer once that engine is secured a top the outcrop it spins a hollow Rod holding a drill bit encrusted with razor sharp diamonds workers Force water between an outer casing and the rod to cool the friction and flush out the shavings after several days they filled dozens of wooden boxes with samples of some of the world's oldest rocks we we are done thanks a lot this is going to make a lot of people happy they shipped the precious cargo 2,000 m east to Denmark's Natural History Museum in Copenhagen for analysis among the samples Drrosing selects one rock formed from silty black layers of Clay on the ancient seabed to find its exact age he crushes a piece extract in tiny minerals called zircons No larger than grains of sugar zircons are like little time capsules how is it going it's going good when they form each Zircon captures a bit of uranium as time passes uranium atoms Decay and convert into lead at a known rate so by determining how much lead is present relative to uranium the team can estimate the sample's age so now we are more or less ready to sap sap the thing with the laser a laser Burns a tiny hole into the ziron 1/3 the size of a human hair that releases a bit of the lead and uranium as superheated gas the gas then flows rapidly into a mass spectrometer for analysis 2. 7 87 this sample is nearly 3.
8 billion years old that's great that's an old age that's really exciting that's very very good C that's the thir thing you find a really nice Circle and then you immediately destroy it a big hole in it this rock is among the oldest ever found on planet Earth when you hold this rock in your hand first of all imagine that it has experienced one about onethird of all time that ever existed but also it carries a memory of the conditions in the ocean 3. 8 billion years ago so by studying These Fine layers we have here we can say okay what fell into the ocean were there any activities in the ocean were the life to find out Drrosing slices a sample so thin it allows him to look right through the rocks layers under the microscope the geologist finds something astonishing tiny black grains what we can see here at very high magnification is some fine layers in the Rock and we can see tiny little particles of something black and by closer inspection turns out that that black material is carbon and there's a lot of it which indicates the presence of billions of tiny cells the basic form of all life once these tiny single cell organisms drifting in the water were alive taking in nutrients reproducing and then dying dropping slowly to the ocean floor and decomposing into their final form carbon that was really exciting because you don't normally find pure carbon in sediments unless it is derived from living organisms so this was the first hint that there were Al at that time that we agreed that this is these are signs of life it's the earliest known record of life on Earth setting back the previous fossil record by hundreds of millions of years from just the fact that this rock is so rich in carbon that is completely black it tells us that the life was efficient it was good at producing organic matter and the only way you can basically do that in the open oceans would be if you live up in the upper few meters of the ocean and you use solar light for energy by some mechanism of photosynthesis and photosynthesis a process that transforms sunlight into food indicates Advanced life so scientists believe the first life likely goes back even further to nearly 4. 4 billion years ago after a rogue Rock the size of Mars hits early Earth about 4.
5 billion years ago it expels molten rock into Earth's orbit then in just one month that orbiting molten rock sticks together forming our moon not long after meteorites bombard planet Earth they carry hydrous minerals compounds that release water upon impact and form early Earth's oceans providing the the earliest opportunity for Life the metroids have the same composition of water as the oceans on Earth oceans were established 4. 4 billion years ago and the water that is now in the oceans has been here since that time basically along with hydris minerals it's conceivable that life or its building blocks also could have hitched a ride to Earth on a meteorite it may have happened as recently as 1969 near the town of merchison in the Australian [Music] Outback there funny smelling meteorites older than Earth itself showered down across 5 square miles they are the fundamental building blocks of the earth and of the solar system as a whole the work that we do on them today won't be the final answer there's a lot more work to be done in the future as techniques improve and new and new things arise the meteorites didn't hold life but their odor came from something common to Earth organic material under greater magnification scientists discover that the rocks are coated with amino acids carbon-based molecules that are among the basic building blocks of all life but what conditions created these molecules in the first place and how might they in turn create a living organism such difficult questions Inspire scientists and artists alike the popular video game Spore imagines if meteorites carried more than just amino acids but sidesteps the question of how life may have been created in the first place we kind of basically punted on the origin of Life question and at the beginning of sport you actually see life you know arriving on the comet and it crashes into the ocean and little shards of it come off and down in the ocean all of a sudden a little single cell organism pops out and starts swimming around that's the beginning of the game there is as yet no proof of alien life having arrived on planet Earth but one question remains what conditions on Earth or elsewhere enabled life to First emerge before life there was no oxygen or ozone layer in Earth's atmosphere instead Earth's non oxygen or reducing atmosphere likely held some ammonia and methane water vapor and hydrogen from evaporating water and lightning due to friction from the heated gas in 1953 chemist Stanley Miller designed an experiment approximating those conditions to see if life could would emerge he Zapped a beaker full of early Earth's likely atmosphere methane ammonia hydrogen and water vapor with a bolt of electricity he called it his spark discharge experiment Miller's former graduate student marine biologist Jeffrey beta was there from early on well this is the original design of the spark discharge experiment you've got this flask here which is simulating a hot evaporating ocean this water vapor goes up through here uh into this flask here this is where the gases would be a mixture of methane ammonia and hydrogen these are electrodes that will use to generate a spark in the system to simulate uh lightning as the spark repeatedly zaps The Vapor over several days the vapor condenses into a liquid flowing down like a river back into the ocean to start the cycle again liquid water is absolutely essential for Life as We Know It And the reason is simple molecules need to be in contact with each other to have any further chemistry and water is an excellent solvent so it dissolves things and once they're in solution just by chance they're going to run into each other and then perhaps there could be further chemistry take place so did Miller create life not exactly but he did create Brown primordial soup the chemical goo that pulled on early Earth before life his electric spark broke chemical bonds in the gas eventually those bonds recombined into hydrogen cyanide along with amino acids the smallest molecules or building blocks of life amino acids link together to form all proteins in living things as humans we all share the same 20 amino acids Miller created five of those 20 amino acids necessary for life it was a first and it launched modern scientific efforts to create life in the laboratory Miller started the whole field of what we call Prebiotic chemistry the chemistry that takes place naturally the produces the compounds essential for Life as we know it but it didn't take long for the scientific Community to raise questions about Miller's experiment many believed his premise was flawed early Earth didn't have an ozone layer to keep out the sun's ultraviolet rays so its atmosphere couldn't have held large amounts of methane and ammonia both methane and ammonia are rapidly destroyed by ultraviolet light and on the early Earth there would have been ultraviolet light penetrating all the way to the surface so all of a sudden we were back to gee maybe this experiment was not relevant to the Earth while continuing his work in the lab DrMiller discovers something that changes our understanding of the origin of life forever but the world won't find out about it for over 50 years more than a half century after Stanley Miller first creates amino acids the building blocks of life his colleague DrJeffrey bet makes an incredible Discovery we found this old dusty cardboard box and open it up and inside this box were all these other little boxes with little vs that were clearly labeled and associated with his 1953 experiments it was just stunning that he I'd known him for 40 years and he' never ever mentioned this and he' never mentioned it to anyone Miller had preserved the brown primordial soup the amino acid results of his experiments for over 50 years then beta uncovers something even more remarkable these results are from a second unpublicized experiment of Miller Miller had met the doubt of his colleagues headon initially most agreed that methane ammonia and hydrogen gases existed on the early Earth but methane and ammonia could not exist in large amounts because of the sun's ultraviolet rays so how then could amino acids have formed Miller's answer volcanoes scientist believe volcanoes formed the first land amid early Earth's vast ocean 4. 4 billion years ago and like Hawaii Today volcanic islands create their own microclimates so when their volcanoes erupt they spew methane ammonia hydrogen and water vapor into a plume that plume along with Ash creates friction causing lightning the lightning then zaps the gases before they're destroyed by the sun all these gases they would have been processed immediately and so these volcanic islands were were little chemical factories that were producing tons of amino acids even though the atmosphere in general was not reducing it had no methane and ammonia in it so Miller made a slight alteration to his original model instead of evaporating ated water entering the gas filled Chamber from the top the water vapor now enters in a plume from the bottom flowing directly into the lightning spark like a volcano the first time Miller tried this his results revealed just a few amino acids so he moved on but the problem wasn't in his results it was with the limited technology he used to measure his results so measuring with today's modern technology it turns out the results are actually extraordinary what we found is this volcanic apparatus as we call it produced the larger variety and in some cases more amino acids than the classic experiment it was a major breakthrough yet even if amino acids were created near Ancient volcanoes on early Earth that doesn't explain how they ultimately bonded together to form a living organism today that process is performed primarily by one complex molecule deoxy ribonucleic acid we know it as DNA its double helix shape resembles a spiral staircase the steps are made from base pairs of nucleotides that's where DNA stores all the information NE necessary to build life the earliest type of DNA was possibly one that could self assemble meaning it formed on its own outside of a cell and if biochemist DrDavid deer can figure out how that happened he could unlock the secrets of first life if you imagine something over 3 ft long containing three billion base pairs that's the amount of DNA in every cell of the human body it's really quite extraordinary so we're trying to figure out the simplest structure of a nucleic acid that would have the properties of DNA the ability to replicate itself the ability to be synthesized right from the start one likely candidate is ribonucleic acid or RNA RNA assists DNA in the building and replication of proteins in all life but rna's structure is simp simpler and more robust because it has just one strand of nucleotides instead of two at the foot of an ancient volcano deep in the primordial soup perhaps some early form of RNA self assembled then helped amino acids to bond together without the ability to self assemble first life could never have emerged uh Darin himself suggested maybe life began in a warm little Little Pond well I would change that to a hot little puddle because we now think that the early Earth was volcanic and that puddles would be pretty hot in the 70 to 80° range 70 to 80° C is about 160 to 175° F any hotter and molecules disintegrate any cooler and the molecules don't react at all so this hot confined p is ideal for instigating chemical reactions but can it break down molecules at one rate and bring them together to self assemble even faster fast enough to build life's complex molecules before they break down again to find out Drdemer prepares small laava rocks with drops of DNA and RNA this is a reddish lava very porous we think that this is the kind of rock that would have been in contact with water on the early Earth he'll expose them to a realworld setting inside a hot vent at the kilaa volcano in Hawaii so here's the first sample of DNA it soaks down into this porest lava some people think that those porous compartments are actually part of how life began because they provided a protective compartment for some of the reactions that were interested in as Drdeer prepares to find out once and for all if first life could have begun In the Heat of a volcanic environment two more teams of scientists one at Harvard the other at Southern Denmark University are pursuing the question of life's origins in a whole new way by racing to be the first to create it in the lab three teams of scientists from around the world aim to be the first to create life from scratch in Denmark DrSteen rasmason heads up the effort probably things going H it's very good I believe life can be made in the laboratory and I think that life can be made in many different ways I don't think there's just one way to do it I believe that there's a variety of designs out here different research groups are pursuing different ways of doing it and I think that uh I'll be very surprised if we won't be able to implement several different minimal or very simple living systems cells are the smallest unit of life organisms range in size from just a single cell to trillions of cells but at their most basic level all cells must have three things in order to survive DNA the information needed to build and reproduce metabolism the ability to take in food change it into energy and discard waste and a membrane a container to hold and protect it all like the video game Spore the ultimate goal is to create new forms of complex multicellular life we unfortunately can't make anything that's like Frankenstein or what you see in Terminator what we're attempting to do is make a life form that's way way simpler than the simplest modern life form so it'll be something that's million times lighter or smaller than than the tiniest modern bacterium so it's very very primitive life these magnified fatty amino acids aren't alive but they are critical for life like soap bubbles adding water to fatty acids causes them to self assemble into round vessel containers perfect for holding and protecting a cell's functions and DNA information a container or membrane is the first step for creating life for the Danish team's recipe they begin with a small dash of ruthenium ruthenium is a rare durable metal usually used for jet engine turbines and computer chips and while it may not have been part of the first life in early Earth for creating life in the lab ruthenium is valuable for one critical quality it absorbs light that quality provides enough energy for basic functions in the team's simple cell or Proto cell once the solution turns orange that means the ruthenium is mixed evenly and is ready for the next step we try to make our protocell from materials that are as simple as possible we want to go from the non-living material to the living material so we we actually make this transition from non-living to to living that's the important part and it's not so easy to do that a second team member prepares a test tube of fatty acids in salt water over a magnetic mixer well it's very simple under this plate we have a disc that turned continuously and basically is magnetize and here we have a little magnet and that will follow the magnet the small white magnet provides an even stir a steady stir ensures the ruthenium gets mixed evenly throughout and now I will start titrating as we call it adding acid to permit the spontaneous formation when the final ingredient hydrochloric acid is added this even mix provides the best chance assembly of protocell membranes the Cloudy texture means that self assembly is successful the membranes are visible only under magnification I can clearly see that I have form a membrane about 1,000 to 10,000 times smaller than your hair this is the first step toward creating life but there's a problem the team must figure out how to insert life's last two elements a metabolism and an information molecule like genes inside in a normal living cell the membrane is controlled by special proteins Gatekeepers that invite what's needed and repel what's not but creating these proteins is far too advanced for a simple protocell so to overcome this problem the Danish team comes up with a revolutionary idea moving the Proto cells insides to its outsides the team chemically attaches genetic material to the outside of the membrane this eliminates the difficulty of moving resources in and out of the cell so this whole Monkey Business of getting things through a membrane you can completely avoid by uh turning the cell into inside out so that you can view yourself more as a used piece of chewing gum or Play-Doh and then you can actually put the different components to the surface of it so then you have your container um decorated with with with your with your genes and with your metabolic complexes and then they stick you know so so it is a container they contain them they make sure that these things are uh close to each other these Inside Out protocells can never exist outside of a test tube still even with this simple protocell the team hasn't figured out how to make them divide to reproduce another generation on their own a critical function for all life but nearly 4,000 miles across the Atlantic the team at Harvard's life initiative has figured out a simple solution DrJack soac and graduate student Ting zuo have determined how to get their membrane vesicle to spontaneously divide without turning it inside out these membrane vesicles we can make them grow and divide all by themselves for a long time we were just thinking about growth in too simplistic a way we thought of a starting off with a spherical vesicle and just it would just get bigger a vesical membrane can grow when small fatty acids or my cells combine with the fatty acids already in the membrane causing it to expand but that type of growth creates difficulty when it comes to division it's really hard to make a spherical vesicle divide you have to change the shape takes a lot of energy to conserve energy tingu developed a groundbreaking process vesical division by simple environmental vibration vibrations similar to those from a wave or current Vos are growing and the tail coming out under the microscope those my cells are growing in a long filament stemming from the vesical membrane actually grows in this surprising Way by uh by building this filamentous extension eventually everything in the round vesicle will go into a long filament after the vesicles grow into filaments the team vibrates the filaments creating new vesical membranes the nice thing is that that that long filamentous vesicle that's forming is very fragile and so it just takes gentle shaking to make that divide into daughter vesicles this is a significant step toward creating life membranes that grow spontaneously on their own but it's still a long way from a living being one critical part part is still missing figuring out how complex genetic molecules like DNA or RNA replicate fully on their own but in Hawaii DrDavid deer may be on the verge of just such a [Music] breakthrough scientists believe volcanoes were integral to the creation of first life on Earth biochemist DrDavid deer wants to know for sure oh look at that isn't that spectacular this is just what I came for these realworld conditions at Mount kilaa in Hawaii's volcano National Park approximate Earth's early environment right on the edge of the kilaa Caldera this is a hot area as part of the volcanic activity and this is where the heat from this magma that is driving the volcano warms up this part of the side of the volcanic area a Caldera is a cauldron likee pit usually formed by the collapse of land following a volcanic eruption scientists believe when life first appeared the Earth was full of places like this one here hot gas vents emit water vapor hydrogen sulfide and sulfur to form a crusty surface everybody used to think and I I'm sure most people still think that life began in the ocean that there's too much calcium too much magnesium too much Ferris iron on the early Earth in the ocean at that time there were volcanoes back then and there would be rain back then so we had now have a freshwater environment now you can do a lot of things in freshwater that just don't work in a marine environment so that's one of the reasons I like to come to places like this and uh see what it was like some 4 billion years ago when water began to condense on early volcanic land masses but life requires more than fresh water it also requires an energy source a volcano provides that energy through heat and reactive chemicals Drdeer will test what role if any energy has in the breakdown and self- assembly of his DNA and RNA test samples he prepared earlier with part Ranger Laura Schuster as a guide he searches for a hot vent with just the right conditions to place his samples it must have a temperature range of 70 to 80° C or 160 to 175 F any hotter and his DNA and RNA samples will cook any cooler and the samples will remain unchanged there are a few [Applause] here we'll move up a little bit bit farther oh look at that yeah that's nice and deep you see how the edges kind of collapsed so be really care I'll be very careful about that well first thing I'm going to do is to make a measurement of the temperature he uses an electronic thermometer with wire leads he'll run the leads deep into the vent to see if the temperature range is right for the test I'm reading about 49 to 50° down there so it's just not nearly hot enough warm enough we need another 25 to 30° okay well why don't we check another hole over here now I'm getting uh something around a little over 50° again so these are uh just too damp I think the U uh with the rain and all that we're experiencing uh just keeping the temperature much too um cool for the kind of chemistry that we're trying to drive they keep looking as protected which is another good sign oh it's hotter feels hotter this hole is close enough for Drdemer to use a standard mercury thermometer wow 60 70 I think this is going to do it okay we got um 75° here looks like this is it yep so I think I'm going to go ahead and try this one and see whether we can't uh get the experiment to go perfect that sounds great I'm happy with that one very good deer retrieves the small lava samples coated with DNA and RNA he prepared earlier in his lab protected in tin foil and secured in a wire mesh they can endure temperatures up to, 1400° F he's trying to find find out if vents like this one will not only break down the building blocks of life but also assemble them again we want to see if any synthetic reactions occur where molecules come together to make larger more complex molecules which is the most interesting of course if DNA or RNA molecules do self assemble then Drdeer will have uncovered strong evidence about first life that it may have begun in a volcanic setting we're going to give this about uh 2 hours time uh in the laboratory we find that that's enough time for the reactions to occur that we're interested in tin foil keeps heat on the samples and prevents rain from cooling them so what's going to happen is the heat will build up in there the heat activates the molecules and allows them to form links two molecules get together they lose a molecule of water and they make a link and this is in fact what life does to grow well it looks like everything's under the control here temperature up where it should be and we'll come back in a couple hours and see what we get if deer's results demonstrate DNA or RNA selfassembly that'll be a major step toward unlocking a mystery of current life it'll also be a Monumental step closer to creating life from scratch in the lab Hawaii's Mount kilaa volcano May The Secret of first life to find out DrDavid deer returns to see what effect the volcano's heat and gases have had on his lava rock test samples he's coated them with DNA and RNA the information archives of all life these samples have been baking for 2 hours in a volcanic vent at 170° F there's our samples they're quite dry quite hot I can't touch them you can see these little chips of lava each of them representing a different experiment that we're doing and we assume that some chemical reactions have occurred under the conditions of pH and temperature in this volcanic [Music] vent back in his lab at the University of California Santa Cruz Drdeer analyzes the results first he adds distilled water to the the samples this simulates early Earth's rain or Tides washing over the dried nucleic molecules the water loosens them from the lava chips providing a solution where the molecular bits have a chance to get closer and react assembling or breaking down further the wedding phase stir up everything that had been dried down originally and gives another try the next time around so we cycle wet dry wet this wedding drying cycle that is very important to concentrating the organic compounds required for the origin of life to find out if the DNA and RNA broke down and built up he extracts the concentrated solution from each sample and places it onto an electris gel the gel is an electrically charged slide that sorts the molecules by size the bigger molecules move more slowly and stay near the top of the slide while the smaller bits move more quickly and fall toward the bottom once sorted the molecules are stained for easy visibility in a photo demer captures the microscopic results the RNA are represented by the short fat streaks the DNA are the tall thin ones it's really quite surprising to me that RNA is more robust than the DNA here's the control RNA that was untreated and here's the the RNA that was on the chip that was treated it looks like a lot of the RNA maybe 90% of it has survived these conditions and that's good because early life needed RNA to be stable at high temperatures to survive but deer wants to see more than just survival he's looking for self assembly the ability of an organic molecule to form on its own outside a cell the critical step to First life self assembly of an RNA molecule in a volcano would be a major Milestone unfortunately the blank columns reveal that no RNA self assembled so deer sostack and rasm Mason's understanding of life's complex systems all have a long way to go before a living being Springs from a test tube now other scientists are looking for that complex understanding beyond Earth using NASA's spacebound Kepler Telescope scientists are hunting for small earthlike planets orbiting sunlike [Music] Stars they will examine more than 100,000 solar systems in the next 3 and 1/2 years they hope that some of these planets orbit at distances from their Sun so that their temperatures might be right for possible lakes and oceans if rare liquid water is found the chances of finding life and its Origins are even greater with Kepler we expect that in the next 3 years we will know of several dozen earthlike planets we will actually find out what are they made of and what what is in their atmospheres what is on their surfaces and then finally the question is are we alone but our best hope of recognizing an alien life form might come from creating life in the lab here on Earth using primitive biochemistries we may answer the fundamental questions about the origins of life without ever leaving our planet if the conditions necessary to start life vary Beyond volcanoes and hot puddles then life could be far more common than we know but Drbeta believes it could have also formed in ice these Frozen flasks hold many of the same brownish amino acids created by DrStanley Miller's hot spark discharge experiment years earlier these flasks were filled with hydrogen cyanide and placed in Cold Storage What's Happening Here is as the water freezes uh leaves behind find little tiny brine pockets of very very concentrated solution and this is where the chemistry takes place and these little brine Pockets can remain liquid even at very cold temperatures not only could life on earth have begun in the cold it implies to Drbeta that alien life might be closer than we think in our own solar system but not on a planet on a moon Jupiter's moon Europa the icy satellite of Jupiter you know has a liquid water ocean covered with ice and you know people are intrigued about whether there's life in that europan ocean I take a different view on it and that is that probably a lot of the chemistry that we think took place on the early Earth producing simple compounds may have or is taking place in the europian ocean now in the billions of years in the future what our gun swells up into a big red giant and engulfs the Earth all of a sudden the europan ocean's going to melt and I look at Europa as a big frozen Prebiotic casserole that could then undergo further processing have a second origin of Life way into the future of our solar system whether scientists can unlock the secret of life's origins in the cold of a glacier or the heat of a volcano one fact is clear using that knowledge to create life in the lab would change the world as we know it scientists believe first life on Earth emerged around 4.
