Topic awaiting preservation: Harvard starts initiative to investigate the origin of life in the universe (Page 1 of 1)

Origins of Life in the Universe Initiative

This sounds pretty interesting!

quote:

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"We start with a mutual acknowledgment of the profound complexity of living systems," said David R. Liu, a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard. But "my expectation is that we will be able to reduce this to a very simple series of logical events that could have taken place with no divine intervention."

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I wonder what will come out of this?

I think it will be interesting to see what they can come up with. I am not sure that I would expect much out of this. Many many people have been going over this for a very long time. I think there is a whole lot of research that still needs to be done in the areas surrounding this issue.

Much of the how and the why of very simple systems is still not very well understood, things seem to not always make sense.
For example why under stress does you body not stop you immune system from working to save energy, but instead actively destroy it. That is pretty weird. There are about a dozen different theories on this one, but none of them have a lot (any) evidence to really back up the claims.

The origin of life really requires a really good understanding of life as a prerequisite, and I do not think that we have that yet, as such I can not expect much to come from this.

Dan @ Code Town

The want to find how life began is basically what this "initiative" is hoping to accomplish.

So if at all possible, can we keep "religion" out of it?

Let alone this is just the early stages of this "ideal".

Please?