Article – Suzan Mazur

Institute for Advanced Study astrophysicist Piet Hut moves lithely, unassumingly, harmoniously through a crowd often in signature t-shirt (unlike Piethut, the asteroid named for him orbiting the sun with a semimajor axis of 2.4 AU, an eccentricity of … Read more »

Article – Suzan Mazur

In January there was Princeton’s publicly streamed powwow on Origin of Life oriented to chemistry. Then February’s private meeting on the subject at CERN on the Swiss-French border, focused on physics and philosophy. Tokyo’s upcoming symposium, March 27-29, … Read more »

Article – Suzan Mazur

Covering a recent Origin of Life meeting at CERN on the outskirts of Geneva, I was surprised to learn that I’d been made a member of Atlas, the particle physics experiment at CERN. As such, I probably qualified for a room at the CERN hotel (dormitory), … Read more »

Article – Suzan Mazur

Steve Benner describes himself as a “crackpot synthetic biologist to some extent” (i.e., he thinks outside the box). Benner pioneered synthetic biology, for example, and in 1984, generated the first synthetic gene to encode an enzyme. Read more »

Article – Suzan Mazur

I met Loren Williams at the recent NASA-sponsored Origins of Life conference at Princeton. He was one of the liveliest questioners, always pitching with a relaxed focus. Williams is a professor of biochemistry at Georgia Institute of Technology and Principal Investigator … Read more »

Article – Suzan Mazur

As British chemist John Sutherland et al . exited following their conference presentations and other invited guests were no-shows, the Princeton Origins of Life event further opened up to the public, which invigorated proceedings. Read more »

Article – Suzan Mazur

John Sutherland, the British chemist and winner of the Lonsdale Origin of Life Challenge last year with Matthew Powner, opened day two of the Princeton conference talking about a new holistic approach to the problem, a theme he hinted at several years … Read more »

Article – Suzan Mazur

In a couple of emails to me, Andrew Pohorille, the most senior NASA scientist working in the Origin of Life field, objected to my recent interview with Arizona State University’s Sara Walker , one of the featured speakers at Princeton’s Origins of Life conference … Read more »

Article – Suzan Mazur

“I think we need to move away from treating a strict RNA world scenario as the central accepted answer for the origin of life because most of the origin of life community don’t think that’s the definitive answer.” — Sara Imari Walker Read more »

Article – Suzan Mazur

The work of Pier Luigi Luisi continues in the best tradition of Italian visionaries of science and the humanities, Alberti, da Vinci, Galileo, Michelangelo. Luisi is currently chair of biochemistry at the University of Roma Tre and director of the … Read more »