Photograph by Stu Rosner; background image NASA/JPL-Caltech
“If you think of the two deepest and most challenging questions we could ask about life, I think they’re ‘How did it begin, and are we alone in the universe?’ ” says Andrew Knoll, Fisher professor of natural history. “And what I find remarkable when I think about it is that we are really the first generation in human history to ask those as scientific rather than philosophical questions.”
The initiative, launched with seed money from the University in 2005, has brought together scientists from largely disconnected fields—astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, earth and planetary sciences—to tackle these issues. Sasselov says such breadth of expertise is necessary because so many conditions influence life’s emergence. How did the Earth aggregate from cosmic elements in such a way that it could support life? What environmental conditions does life require? How do inorganic molecules begin to behave like living organisms: replicating, organizing into cells, growing, evolving?
“In a certain sense our main question is really: what is the nature of life?” Sasselov explains. “That’s why we call it the Origins of Life Initiative. The plural here is very intentional.” If the only goal is to understand life on Earth, he says, it’s a historical question. But if the goal is to understand how life emerges from particular environmental and chemical conditions, then the answer is much more fundamental. It raises the possibility that life could form in different ways on different planets. And ultimately, Sasselov believes, it could help us move beyond simply describing life to uncovering universal principles that govern it, akin to principles of planetary motion.
