On May 25, Nobel Prize winning scientist Jack Szostak spoke to a group of students, faculty and guests about his ongoing research into the evolution of early cellular life.
The presentation, entitled “Reconstructing the first cells,” delved into the research that he and his colleagues are currently working on.
Szostak, professor of genetics at Harvard University and investigator for the Massachussetts General Hospital and the Howard Hughes Medical Center, won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 2009 for his discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres. His presentation was the keynote address for a weeklong symposium taking place at Georgia State from May 23 to May 28.
The symposium was put together in conjunction with the Center for Workshops in Chemical Sciences (CWCS). CWCS is a National Science Foundation funded program that provides workshops designed to provide a background on key issues in chemical sciences today for faculty at U.S. colleges.
Before the lecture began, Zhen Huang, professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Georgia State, presented a gift to Szostak on behalf of the faculty. Huang mentioned that he was a little worried after Szostak won the Nobel Prize because he thought that the popular scientist would be too busy to keep his speaking engagement. In his appreciation, Huang presented him with a Nobel Prize made out of chocolate.
Szostak explained that the main goals of his research were to better understand how biology and evolution emerges from chemical systems and to learn how life started. He explained that over the past several years, there has been a resurgence of fundamental questions about how life started and the role it plays in the universe due to recent discoveries of organisms found living in extreme environments.
“There’s almost no corner of the planet that hasn’t been colonized,” he said as he described how these things allow us to think about the origin of life as well as our place in the universe. Szostak also touched on the progress being made by astronomers who have found hundreds of new planets and said that it is likely that we will find one with similar properties to the Earth in the next several decades.
Szostak described in detail the research that he and his staff have undertaken over the past several years.
“Let’s assume that the building blocks that are needed are there. So what we do is focus on what more do they need [to undergo evolution]. How do they interact? How do they grow and divide without any of the highly developed machinery used nowadays?” he said.
The idea is a fairly simple one. How do simple cells evolve into the complex working systems that we have today? His main studies concentrate on doing this with synthetic cellular systems made in the lab.
Though there is more research to do, Szostak and his colleagues continue to break new ground and are making headway on the fundamental questions of life in the universe.
The CWCS symposium is just one of Georgia State’s efforts to compete with the scientific research community and maintain its reputation as one of the leading research universities in the Southeast and the nation.
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