YouSaid · the spoken record

Betül Kaçar

lines on the record: 191
first: 2022-12-29
most recent: 2022-12-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“That's what it turned out to be because that's what the data told us that if the variation is higher than the consequences will also be higher in the sense that the cells will not grow as healthy compared to a variant that is coming from a near or a variant that is coming from a near evolutionary distance.”
2022-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I like to think of it as hidden because I like to think that there's breaking the salt, right? I mean, not breaking enough to kill it, but they're still alive. They're not doing their job well.”
2022-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Simultaneously, it turned out that what we observed in general is that, first of all, the harder we hit the cells, the more likely they were to respond by changes at where we...”
2022-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. So we knew where we punched, right? We punched right the heart. We punched the translation. So we expected Are we going to see change? Will translation respond to this by fixing itself right away? Or will it be another outside of translation, something completely different, a different module? Because translation itself is a module? Or will it be within elongation, a really subprotein level thing? So we had a strategy to identify the mutational pathways by categorizing what we expected to find or where.”
2022-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We varied it to this evolutionary distance, and then we kept the experimental conditions the same, and we propagated these populations every day for 150 days, and we collected bacteria every step of the way and looked at the sequence. We wanted to understand what sort of changes may have happened in the genome to respond to The variation that we've introduced.”
2022-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's the same way. So we introduce variation at the elongation level because we perturbed it with different elongations, we found that if we introduce Different protein that is very different. The cells don't like that, right? So if the distance is larger, the consequences also large, meaning that you hit them harder. If you introduce a variant that is really foreign to them, that's really distant. In our case, it was the ancestor. They really did not like the ancestor. But they were okay with their nearest cousin.”
2022-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We kept the environments because we had different initial conditions. We kept the environment constant, same temperature, same food, same source of carbon. But we created replicates for each lineage. So in some ways we created our own fossil record in the lab by evolving and generating these flasks. And every step of the way we also froze these cells and took stocks of them in the cryo freezer.”
2022-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For 24 hours until they reach a more dormant state, and then we introduce them to a new environment. So we repeated this for about it. I will say 150 days. So every day nonstop, we repeated this experiment.”
2022-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we really messed them up. They don't want to work with this thing. They don't want each other, but they need each other. So we created that situation for them, which is good because we want to see how they will cooperate with each other to fix this problem because we know that that's not the condition that they want to live in, especially when they know what they can do. So with that, we subjected these organisms to evolution in the lab that we refer to this as experimental evolution. We subject bacteria to different selection pressure, project them through bottlenecks. Every day we randomly collect a handful of bacteria from the flask, put them in a new fresh environment with fresh food, keep them in this environment.”
2022-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So let me describe to you what we did in that experiment. We took bacteria, we perturbed the elongation in all of these with different variants. So we had an initial set of A group of bacteria that we had. We then subjected these bacteria to evolution in the lab. First of all, we knew we broke it because upon engineering, we measured what's going on with the cell. It's not growing as well. They are not healthy. We can see it with our eyes. We can measure it. That if they were generating an offspring every 20 minutes, now it is 40 minutes.”
2022-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Depends on what you do. So for initiation, we've also recently published this. It's a different story. But overall, you see high level of identity that is kept intact, especially if the component is essential for life.”
2022-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So now you stripped the machinery down to its parts, and now you are looking at the parts of the parts. And it depends where you're looking and however you're looking and what you're looking at. But usually we see up to 70% level conserved identity across all modern versions. When you travel back in time, the identity decreases. So elongation likely existed. We have good reason to think that it existed at the dawn of life. So you're looking at a 3.8 billion year old mechanism. And when we look at the ancestors that we resurrect, we see about 40% identity. So the identity definitely decreases as you go back in time, but still 60% shared information over 4 billion years is pretty good.”
2022-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Different flips on the kitchen. Usually, the parts that matter don't change over time. Nature conserves the sites of these proteins that are important for his job. If there's a difference, then we want to know, especially if there's a difference between two cousins. And we look at the sites that interact with the most important parts of this machinery. If we see any difference, we tend to mutate or we revert, we engineer that part, we alter that part because it gives us a clue that there must be something interesting going on here or not.”
2022-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It has its tail that's attached to the code, which is then carried biochemically to the linear chain, to the core of ribosome. And it sits on there. It's released and the peptides click, the codes rather click once that chemistry that's at the tail end occurs, the protein leaves the center. So you can imagine it's like it hops in there and hops out. And when it hops and hops out, it leaves the information behind. That's all it does is bring the information, get out of there. And it's all triggered by biophysics, biochemistry because of the way the enzyme chews energy, in this case GTP, half the phosphor leaves, the center that kicks, that gives the additional kick to the enzyme to leave the center.”
2022-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a very good question. So, mechanistically or mechanically, it's the same. It's very conserved. So all life elongates the same way. It's nothing but a shuttle. You just carry a chemical with you, the bit to the heart of the machine.”
2022-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, because we were not supposed to mess with the translation. That's exactly what we did. And we altered elongation by changing it with different versions of elongation that are either coming from species that still are around today. You can imagine them as sitting on the tips of the tree near branch, far branch compared to the organism that we're working with. cousins, distant cousins.”
2022-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We wanted to understand multiple things. One is how does the cell respond to perturbation? And we didn't just put the ancient DNA. We inserted, we sampled DNA from currently existing organisms. So the cousins of this microbe and collected DNA sequences from the cousins as well. So both ancestor and the current cousin DNA, so to speak, and engineered all of these things to the modern bacteria and generated a collection of microbes that either have the ancient component or the variant elongator component that is still alive today but coming from a different part of the tree.”
2022-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wouldn't say so. It's a hybrid organism. Because the rest of this genome is still modern. And that goes back to the difference between Jurassic Park. There are many differences, obviously, given that this is not fiction. We're doing it. But also, we are not necessarily, I think in Jurassic Park, they are taking they find an ancient organism and then put a modern gene inside the ancient organism. In our case, we are still working with what we got, but putting an ancestral DNA inside the modern organism.”
2022-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we have four steps of the transition to initiate elongate. So elongate the chain of the information chain that you're now creating, the peptide chain, or let's say broadly polymer chain. And there's a termination step and there's the recycling. So all of these steps are carried out by proteins that are also named after these steps initiation is the initiation factor protein elongation is the elongator protein. We broke elongation. So the starting codon could still arrive to where it's supposed to go, but the following information couldn't get carried out because we replaced elongation with its own ancestral version. So we inserted Roughly 700 million year old elongation factor protein After removing the modern gene. So we made this ancient modern hybrid organism.”
2022-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, because that's how kids learn, right? So you have to break something and see how it, and you do it over and over again to see if it will fix itself in the same ways. So it's our, I don't know, it's the most fundamental properties of ourselves as human beings. So if we shouldn't break translation, then we should try to break it. To see how it will repair.”
2022-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know if there are any rules like that. It would be fascinating to find in terms of the biology's rules. That's a very interesting and very fascinating area of study now. And probably we will hear more about that decades to come. But if you want to go from the broad to specific, you need to understand the rules of selection. And that is going to come from understanding biology, yes.”
2022-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Biology, so this is not a disciplinary problem of one discipline triumphing other discipline. But what you need to have is definitely, chemistry is everywhere, right? To think you can be a chemist, you can study chemistry, you can study physics, you can study geology anywhere in the universe, but this is the only place you can study biology. This is the only place to be a biologist. So, definitely something very fundamental happened here, and you cannot take biology out of the equation. If you want to understand how that vast chemistry space, how that general sequence space got narrowed down to what is available or what is used by life, you need to understand the rules of selection. And that's when evolution and biology comes into play.”
2022-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because chemistry can always sample, right? So chemistry is chemistry. But are you just constantly sampling or are you building on your former solutions and then maintaining a memory of those solutions over billions of years? Or at least that's what happened here.”
2022-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If that chemistry or the solutions that it embarks upon are maintained in a form of memory. So you don't just need to have the exploring chemical space, but you need to also maintain a memory of some of those solutions for over long periods of time. So that's the memory component. Makes it more living to me.”
2022-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say that It's hard to quantify this or even measure it, but it is a. Life is definitely the chemistry finding solutions, right? So it is chemistry exploring itself And maintaining this exploration for billions of years.”
2022-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't make the move, right? I mean, like, look at plants. I mean, they grow, but there are plants that can be also pretty dormant. And arguably, they do everything that one of my favorite professors once said, that the plant does everything that a giraffe does without moving. So movement is not. Necessarily”
2022-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lifelike list. I don't know. I don't think that defining is that essential. I think it's a good exercise. But I'm not sure if we need to agree a universally defined way of understanding life because the definition itself seems to be ever evolving anyway, right? We have the NASA's definition. It has its minuses and pluses, but it seems to be doing its job”
2022-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. It depends on what you are defining it for. If you're defining it for finding different life forms, then it probably needs to have some quantification in it so that you can use it in whatever the mission that you're operating. So you mean like it's not.”
2022-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think they look at the theoretical optimum for electronic devices And then try to understand where life falls on this, and life is certainly more efficient.”
2022-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That you tell me. That's why I dropped the citation. I found the citation. It's quite an interesting paper. It's a bit, you know, it's a obviously you can only calculate an inf for these things.”
2022-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's actually a paper published in 2013, I want to say the first author Zirnov. So they surveyed Computational engineered systems level computation energy consumption. And they tried to understand whether the universe is using its own or life is using its full capacity of energy consumption and whether if different planets in the universe had life, the capacity would increase or decrease. Does life operate at its energy maximum? And they think that it does, that it actually operates at an efficiency that is far more above and beyond any computational system.”
2022-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think when we truly understand the answer to that question, we may have just made ourselves live, right? I don't think we know quite how translation machinery as a whole fits into the equation, because we try to understand ribosomes, RNA, how the linear information is processed. Or the genetic code, why this codons, not others, why 20, not more, not less. And we are sort of moving towards transition. That's what we are working on anyway, to finally look at the patterns in which this system operates itself. And if you understand that, you're really unlocking a very emergent behavior.”
2022-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and somehow that's what got selected, maybe not selected. I don't know if it was accidental, but that's what it seems to be conserved for four billion years, that that's what life established.”
2022-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a way to process materials and it is inherently dynamic and it is flexible, but it is not focused on reputation as translation does. So that's the main difference. Translation is kind of in a way, just it repeats, right? So you have the metabolism that can synthesize materials, creates or benefits from available energy. And again, it's a dynamic system. And then you have computation that it is inherently repetitive, right? Needs to carry out repetitive processes and it does the tasks an algorithm, but it is not dynamic. So you see both of those attributes in translation combined. It is repetitive and it is dynamic. And it also processes this information. So they are fundamentally different. I don't know if you can get Life, if you don't find a way to process the information around you.”
2022-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the more we learn about, and this is why early life and origin is also very fascinating and applicable to many different disciplines. There is no way you see this the way we just described it unless you think about early life and early geochemistry and earliest emergent systems, but going back to the biological component, all of these attributes that we think about life or that we associate with biology stems from translation and as well as metabolism. But I see metabolism as a way to keep translation going and translation keeps metabolism going, but translation is arguably a bit more sophisticated process for the reasons that I just described.”
2022-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They need, so that's a great segue into what makes us biological, right? The heart of the cellular activities are translation. You kill translation, you kill the cell. Not only the translation itself, you kill the component that initiates it, you kill the cell. You remove the component that elongates it, you kill the cell. So there are many different ways to disrupt this machinery. All the parts are important. Now, it can vary across different organisms. We see variation between bacteria versus eukaryotes versus archaea, right? So it is not the same exact steps, but Can get more crowded as we get closer to eukaryotes, for instance. But you are still computing about 20 amino acids per second, right? This is what you're generating every second.”
2022-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In its own way, and again, if we manage to figure out how to drive life's evolution, if it can evolve a sophisticated sort of information processing system like this, you may ask yourself what might chemical systems be capable of independently doing under different circumstances.”
2022-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's almost intelligence at the chemical level, and this is also probably one of the first. Chemical intelligent system that evolved by itself in nature.”
2022-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you defy the code of Douglas Adams. You are proud of your ancestors and you invite them over to dinner and you invite them over to your Twitter.”
2022-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We call it the last because it is sort of the first one that we can track. Because we cannot know what we cannot track, right?”
2022-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So when we talk about the tree, when we think about the root, if you ideally included all the living information or all the available information that comes from living organisms on your tree, then on the root of your tree lies the last universal common ancestor, Luca, right?”
2022-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It appears to be a highly optimized chemical and information code. It may indicate that a great deal of chemical evolution, and this may indicate that a lot of selection pressure and Darwinian evolution happened prior to the rise of last universal common ancestor, because this is almost a bridge that connects the earliest cells to the last universal common ancestor.”
2022-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. That's the informatic perspective. And it's important to emphasize that this is not engineered by humans. This evolved by itself”
2022-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you're a biologist and you want to understand how life evolved from a molecular perspective, this would be the way to do it. And this is what nature narrowed its code down to. So when we think of nitrogen, when we think of carbon, when we think of sulfur, it's all in this, that all these nucleotides are built based on those elements”
2022-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because all the final letters, that's the 20 amino acids, that's our alphabet. They're all brought together with these bits of information, right? So when you look at the genes, you're looking at those four letters. When you look at the proteins, you're looking at the 20 amino acids, which may be a little easier way to track the information when we create the tree.”
2022-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We understand to some degree how translation and the rest of the cell work together, how an error at the translation level, this is a really core level, can impact entire cell. But we understand very little about the evolutionary mechanisms behind the selection of the system. It's thought to be as one of the hardest problems in biology, and it is still the dark side of biology. Even though it is so essential. So this is, yeah, you're looking at Language of life, so to speak, and how it can found ways rather to tolerate its own mistakes.”
2022-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mechanism behind this, or we certainly don't know this definitively. But this is informatic part of this. And notice that the colors in some tables too, the colors will be coded in a way that the type of the nucleotides can be similar chemically. But the point is that you will still end up with the same amino acids or something similar to it, even if you mess up the code.”
2022-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there were sentences, and again, you get one start, you get three, there are three different ways to stop this. One way to start it. And for each letter, you have multiple options. So you say you have a code A, the second code can be another A. And even if you mess that up, you still can't rescue yourself. So you can get it. For instance, I'm looking at the Lysine K. You get an A and you get an A and then you get an A that gives you the lysine. But if you get an A and if you get an A and I get a G, you still get the lysine. So there are different combinations. So even if there's an error, we don't know if these are selected because they were erroneous and somehow they got locked down. We don't know if there is a.”
2022-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Me, that is fascinating that all life starts with the same starts. There's no other start code. So you send the AG, you know, AUG to the cell that when that information arrives, the translation knows, all right, I gotta start function is coming. Following this is a chain of information until the Arrives which are highlighted in black squares.”
2022-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. So we make trees to understand what the original ancestor, what did they use to say snow? And if you have a lot of cultures who use the word snow, you can imagine that it was snowy. That's why they needed that word. It's the same thing for biology, right? If they have some, if we understand some function about that enzyme, we can... Understand the environment that they lived in. It's similar in that sense. So now you're looking at the alphabet of life. In this case, it's not 20 or 25 letters. You have four letters. So what is really interesting that stands out to me when I look at this. On the outer shell, you're looking at the too many amino acids that compose life, right? The one the methionine that you see, that's the start. So the start is always the same.”
2022-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source