Year: 2022

LIFE DEFINED. “The ability to evolve, self-reproduce, metabolize, adapt and die." https://lnkd.in/dwADMWc View in LinkedIn

NEW FORMS. "Life for me is a physical process. In principle, living processes can be carried by different kinds of materials. You are not limited to biochemistry. In our laboratory, in experiments we did at both Los Alamos and here in Denmark, we were not using biological materials. We're using molecules that do not exist in modern biology. We're really building out of something that's different than what modern biology is using." https://lnkd.in/dwADMWc View in LinkedIn

ANY MATERIALS. "In principle, you could build living systems out of robotics parts. Life is a much more general process than what we see in modern biology. You can have living processes carried by robotic systems, by computational systems and by mixtures of biological, robotics and computational systems." https://lnkd.in/dwADMWc View in LinkedIn

STEPS BACK. "If you want to create life more simplistically than modern life is doing it, you can't use the sophisticated solutions modern life has evolved. It means you end up constructing your own building blocks. You have to build systems that are based on much simpler components. You actually need to have some of these components to carry more than one functionality." https://lnkd.in/dwADMWc View in LinkedIn

THE TRANSITION. "We want to understand how the nonliving materials, if you put them together in an appropriate manner, suddenly can become living. It has to do with understanding how matter organizes in a different way." https://lnkd.in/dwADMWc View in LinkedIn

ALCHEMICAL GOLD. "The intellectual part for me, what has kept me up at night, is this fascination with why materials in certain forms are alive and in other forms are not. Trying to figure out the secret of how to put materials together so they dance and become alive." https://lnkd.in/dwADMWc View in LinkedIn

HOLY GRAIL. "Von Neumann proved in the 1950s that machines exist that are able to make everything including copies of themselves, as long as the construction process can be expressed as recipes (algorithms). This defines the Universal Constructor, which is a mathematical machine, which has not yet been implemented." https://lnkd.in/dwADMWc View in LinkedIn

NOT THE LAST. "If you and I as humans create artificial living processes and machines that can copy themselves and ultimately evolve, where will this bring us? Considering that Homo Sapiens is a very, very recent invention in biological evolution, we as humans are naive if we believe we are the end product of evolution. I’m sure we are not. So there's certainly something to think about. It’s likely that we’ll help create the next major evolutionary step." https://lnkd.in/dwADMWc View in LinkedIn

100 PROTOCELL LABS. "How many labs worldwide would you say are now working on protocell development and which are the key labs? I think there are more than 100, if the goal is working on different aspects of a protocell." https://lnkd.in/dwADMWc View in LinkedIn

HEURISTIC METHOD. "Even though the protocellular systems we are working on are much, much simpler than modern cells, they are still so complicated chemically that it is very difficult to predict whether what we set out to do will work or not. We have to try it out. No theory or calculation can ensure that it will work or not." https://lnkd.in/dwADMWc View in LinkedIn