I'm Steve Strogatz, and this is The Joy of Watt.

A podcast from Quantum Magazine that takes you into some of the biggest unanswered questions in science and math today.

In this episode, we're going to be looking at our best current understanding of the origin of life.

How did life begin on Earth?

Did it begin, as Charles Darwin once speculated, in a warm little pond somewhere? The kind of

nurturing, supportive place where it's easy to picture delicate biology taking shape? Wherever

life began, what were the earliest building blocks of life? Were they the molecules that we hear

so much about today, DNA and RNA and amino acids, lipids? Or was there something much simpler?

In the past few years, some important clues have turned up. The payoff to answering these kinds

of questions would be huge, not just for understanding how life began on Earth, but also to help us look

for life on other planets, and maybe to figure out if we are alone in the universe.

Later, we'll be joined by Bituyl Kachar, an assistant professor of bacteriology at the University

of Wisconsin, Madison. But first, joining me to discuss all this is Jack Shostack.

Jack is a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard University, a professor of

genetics at Harvard Medical School, and an investigator in the Department of Molecular Biology

at Massachusetts General Hospital. He shared a Nobel Prize in 2009 for his work on the discovery

of telomerase, an enzyme that protects chromosomes from degrading. Jack Shostak, thank

you so much for joining us today.

Thank you for having me here. Let me start with a question about the origin of life.

As I say, it's one of the greatest mysteries in all of science,

and the attempt to solve it seems like one of the greatest detective stories of all time.

What would be your best guess for how life began on Earth?

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