This story appeared in the Fall 2019 Letters & Science magazine.
My job is to make sense of the natural world in all of its complexity and weirdness. Specifically, I strive to grasp how the remarkable diversity of lifeforms on our planet came to be. In this endeavor, I draw on thought, observation and experiment. And, of course, on insights emerging through teaching.
The classroom has always been a space in which I can sharpen my understanding and take a fresh look at my field through the eyes of students not burdened by too many preconceptions.
In fact, I am involved in an ongoing research program that would have never come to be had I not spent some 20 years lecturing on the origin of life to introductory biological sciences students.
In my view, any biology course needs to address the elephant in the room: How did life on Earth get started?
Some have argued that this is not a problem of biology but one of chemistry and planetary science: namely the transition from geochemistry to biochemistry.
But I believe that any biology student, from undergraduate to full professor, should ponder how life began. Consequently, I have brought the thorny problem of the origin of life into almost all my classes.
What I did not expect was that this semester-by-semester tickling of my curiosity would eventually lead to ambitious NASA- and National Science Foundation-funded experiments aimed at generating artificial life—new chemical systems capable of perpetuating themselves and evolving adaptively.
As I revisited the origins of life literature in each class, I came to recognize a pervasive, yet unwarranted, assumption that life’s emergence required extremely rare and improbable circumstances.
If that were true, then experimental work on the origin of life would be of limited use. But what if, as Darwin imagined in 1871, life of the simplest kind can readily arise “ready to undergo still more complex changes” just so long as modern life is not around to devour it?
In that case, it ought to be possible to use evolutionary principles to design laboratory experiments to search for artificial life.
Some five years ago, I decided to put this theory to the test. Fortunately, I was able to draw in many wonderful collaborators, both at UW-Madison and elsewhere, and to convince grant panels to invest substantially in a novel approach. And I was also lucky to recruit many wonderful undergraduate and graduate students who share this passion for discovery.
Experiments are ongoing, but I will say that we have already obtained some intriguing results.
Whether or not we succeed in discovering artificial life, this research will surely advance our understanding of how life originates and enable me to provide students a more compelling explanation for the very existence of biological diversity.
The implication is clear: Teaching can lead to understanding on the part not only of students but also of the professor.