Results for “Jack Szostak”

The real mystery is not why organisms as complicated as us age and die, but why there is a kind of immortality through the germ line! There clearly is some way that all the damaging aspects of life that feed into ageing are overcome in the germ line.

Nobel Prize Winner for Work on Chromosome Protection and Telomeres

My colleague Jerry Joyce once chaired a NASA committee that defined life in a practical sense, as a self-sustaining chemical system with the potential for Darwinian evolution (the hallmark of biology). That's a perfectly adequate operational definition that is appropriate for research into the origins of life. Obviously it has nothing to do with consciousness, or even the experience of being alive.

Nobel Prize Winner for Work on Chromosome Protection and Telomeres