Abstract:
How chemistry turned into biology—that is, how life originated—remains one of science's biggest open questions. I will start by discussing major hypotheses and some pioneering experimental work on how life might have originated on Earth. I will then revisit the remarkable, yet seemingly discredited and subsequently forgotten, experiments from the 1950s on "jeewanu" -- particles of life -- by Krishna Bahadur and S. Ranganayaki, a scientist couple at the University of Allahabad. Building on this forgotten work, my team has launched an original research program that has yielded many new insights and possibilities. I'll conclude with the implications of this discovery and the next steps toward understanding life and its origins.
About the Speaker:
Shashi Thutupalli is a faculty member at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) and the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences (ICTS-TIFR), Bangalore. He earned his PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organisation in Göttingen and did postdoctoral research at Princeton University. Drawing on approaches and ideas from physics, biology, mathematics and engineering, he and his group combine experiment and theory to study how living systems originate and organize themselves, both by building synthetic mimics of living matter from scratch and by investigating metabolism, self-replication and origin-of-life scenarios.
Supported by Arista Networks India Pvt. Ltd