Professor Nick Lane is a British biochemist, writer and professor of evolutionary biochemistry at University College London. In his lab, Lane has been developing a grand theory for the origin of life. While many scientists look for clues from DNA and other replicating molecules, Lane believes the origin of life can be explained from the perspective of energy. His theories are radical. His thinking is original. And his books will leave you reeling with a new-found understanding of existence. I decided to find out more about the person behind these breathtaking thoughts and theories. During our conversation, which has been edited at parts for clarity, we discussed topics ranging from advice for going into science, to more personal philosophical questions such as knowing when to give up.
What do you think are the most important traits of a scientist?
Read some of Peter Medawar’s writing. One of them [his books] is ‘Advice to a young scientist’. He makes a very good comment: he’s saying mathematicians very often seem like a different species practically; they see things that normal people don’t see. And his point is scientists aren’t like that, that you can be an extremely ordinary person and be a very good scientist. And he said that, this is not to belittle scientists, this is actually to glorify ordinary people. Because, you can have scientists who could’ve been poets or historians or, just about anything – there’s so many ways of doing science, there’s so many ways of approaching problems, there isn’t a single method. So, in the end, it’s the ability to keep going. It’s the ability to have a fascination with a soluble question – that’s part of the trick – to find. Medawar describes science as the art of the soluble, you have to find something which you can think of a way of addressing. And then you have to not give up. You have to keep your teeth locked on it somehow, and not just give up the first time things go wrong.
How do you deal with failure?
Most of science is failure … But I think people would get bored very quickly if you just talked about stuff that didn’t work. Most stuff in the lab doesn’t work as you wanted it to – you learn that as you do science. And I think this is perhaps overlooked, but it’s one of the most important aspects of being a scientist – it’s being excited enough to pursue the questions and to really care about it, but not so much that when it all goes wrong and everything you’ve been doing for the last 6 months or 2 years or something turns out not to be true. To be able to pick yourself up and to re-orientate and continue.
And it’s got nothing to do with intelligence, it’s got nothing to do with whether your ideas are good or not. It’s to do with personality type, and whether you can modulate your own personality so that you can deal with failure because, you will deal with failure as a scientist. It’s not going to work – and if it does work all the time then, maybe you’re not doing real research!
The excitement of it is doing things that we don’t know of yet – so it’s bound to fail! Very often as well, your idea of how it might work, is actually going to be wrong. And when things fail, it ships you this way, and that way. And you hone in on some things – things that don’t work; you have to try and work out, “Why did it not work?”. That’s why controls are so important. And I think it’s something that you learn and you live with – the uncertainty.
The fact that most things that you try don’t work for reasons which are probably trivial most of the time, but sometimes they fundamentally didn’t work because it doesn’t work that way. A lot of the time it didn’t work because, the partial pressure of hydrogen wasn’t high enough – so build a high-pressure version of the reactor and maybe it’ll work then – we don’t know! So, I think you have to learn to really enjoy the good bits, celebrate the good bits, and try not to let the bad bits get to you.
How do you know when to give up?
Erm… I don’t know. I mean, I suppose I gave up after my PhD! I think the thing is you know when you don’t want to give up. You know when you’re onto something... and I think I’m onto something, and that’s why I’m excited about it all. And so the daily knocks where it [an experiment] doesn’t work when you expected it to, I can deal with because I’m sure that the overall picture is along the right lines and if I just keep plucking away it will resolve itself.
So I think the only really good advice I can give anybody about going into science is, do what you’re really interested in. Don’t think about – where’s the money, where’s the grant funding, where are the positions available, who do I know, how can I put it on my contacts – any of those things. If you just do what you really love, that will transmit to people. And there’s enough people out there that, chances are, it will work out somehow. And this seems to happen time and time again, where people who are really keen on a particular area do very well. They get along very well because there’s enough people in the world who can see that in their eyes and they just wanna help them out because, that’s how science works.
The thing about doing what you’re really interested in is, it’s easier to keep going. Whereas if you’re doing things that you’re not really that motivated by, then it becomes just a job. Then it’s much easier to give up, because, it’s not your life. And that’s difficult because, it’s probably not an easy career path – science. You’ve got to do a PhD, do post-doc jobs with short contracts and no guarantee of a permanent position at the end of it. There’s a lot of job insecurity. There’s a lot of chances that it’ll never work out. So a lot of people will think, “Well why am I putting myself through this, why don’t I just go and get a proper job in the city that pays me and do something else?” So I think that there’s a degree of self-selection, where if you really love doing it and keep doing then you end up floating, floating up.
How do you obtain funding for a project?
It’s difficult, and it takes up far too much time. You end up spending half the year writing grant applications which is not how it ought to be. And most of them fail – another case of failure. I think one out of my last seven grant applications were successful.
Funding the big life questions is not as easily justifiable in societal terms as say, cancer research.
I think there’s an appetite in society – look at how popular Brian Cox is – we all want to know about how the universe come into existence, how life started; it’s a human question. But somehow it’s not working its way through the government to fund that kind of research so, it’s tricky. Maybe I should give up, but, on the other hand, something’s always worked out in the end.
Tenure doesn’t really exist anymore – if you don’t bring in grant money you won’t have a job; you have to justify yourself all the time. And I’m not sure if that’s unfair I don’t know, but what it means is I know that for the next two years I’m okay – then Brexit happens and god knows what will happen.
There’s never any job security really. It means that you’re focussed now – I’ve got some funding, I’ve got some ideas, I’ve got a window of 2 or 3 years to make some progress, if I can’t make any progress in that time, well, maybe it’s time to call a day on it anyway. I think living with the uncertainty of science, and living with the uncertainty of the future are two things you just get used to after a while and becomes, just part of the back job that you go on.
Finally, your entire research is centred around how life started on Earth. What is your opinion on life on other planets?
I’d like to think it was similar, in a superficial way. The last book I wrote was subtitled, “Why is life the way it is?”, and it pointed out this whole series of paradoxes about why it was basically bacteria for 2 billion years or more, why complex life only arose once – which seems to have happened – why all eukaryotes share exactly the same traits, why is it that a fungus has cells that are like my cells, or a plant has cells that are like my cells – even though they have completely different life styles, different environments, everything’s different.
So if all that adaptation was to an external environment and to a particular way of life, then they should all have really different building blocks – but they don’t. They’re basically the same, so it’s odd. And I think it’s to do with selection for the inside; what’s inside rather than what’s outside.
And asking questions from a more theoretical point of view means that you ask about what doesn’t exist as well as what does exist. But what is it about planetary conditions that shepherds down towards bioenergetics and stresses the importance of structure, and would we see those conditions on other planets? To which I think the answer is yes. Because all the requirements are is water and rock – so minerals like olivine.
So, you need a wet rocky planet – if you have the kind of vents I’m talking about, which means CO2 and hydrogen are going to be common as well. So it’s just as a matter of statistical probability. If you were to find life on a thousand different planets, chances are it would be carbon-based. It would involve water, CO2, hydrogen and proton gradients – and so you would have the same set of physical constraints. So, I think life would be quite similar. I know it’s very easy for me to make this kind of prediction because the chances of me being proved wrong is really remote!