Hello and welcome to the podcast of the Life Scientific.

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4.

I'm Jim Alleili and my mission is to interview

the most fascinating and important scientists alive today and to find out what makes them tick.

My guest today is attempting to answer one of the hardest questions in science.

How did life on Earth begin?

You might think that this question was solved by Darwin back in the 19th century.

He wrote that he thought life might have started on earth in a warm little pond,

where all the necessary ingredients, water, nutrients and sunlight,

combined in a primordial soup to create the very first bio molecule of life.

Others like Fred Hoyle thought that life came to earth from elsewhere in space.

But Nick Lane has different ideas of how and where it happened,

that the place in question was deep down at the bottom of the sea in hydrothermal vents.

Amongst other researcher carries out at University College London, he's running an experiment

to try to recreate this moment.

Nick Lane had an unusual route to this point in his scientific

career. For some years he left his research career to become a medical journalist and write

popular books. A rare opportunity took him back into the laboratory.

Nick Lane welcome to the life scientific. Thank you, pleasure. Do you really

think you can discover how life began on earth billions of years ago.

We'll never know how it actually started, but what we can do is understand how all the steps could have happened.

We can understand it intellectually. Perhaps it was different to that but science can only really try to

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