Lee Cronin: 'Aliens could be made from iron'

Lee Cronin said that the potential benefits of the development of inorganic materials

Lee Cronin Gardiner Professor of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow. He also heads the Group Cronin, who participates in "building complex functional molecular architectures are based on building blocks of biological origin." Earlier this year, gave a talk at TEDGlobal in Edinburgh.

What is the biology

inorganic?

Biology inorganic is my attempt to try to make a very basic question about the nature of matter in the universe can be made of organic chemistry, biology

Do you think that biology is defined by evolution?

Yes, evolution occurs in biology, but does not occur anywhere else in the natural world. What I mean by evolution is the idea of ??survival of the fittest and adaptation of replication or the birth of the offspring. Evolution is a great way to make the complex systems that are robust and operate in an environment. The evolutionary theory of Darwin is actually a theory of evolution because it applies only to biology, applies only to the carbon-based life. However, four and a half million years there was no life. I wanted to ask: what is the basic unit of most things regardless of who may be changing? Is likely to tell me the answer ...

bacteria

Exactly, a biologist can say the bacteria are too complex, but basically they are unicellular some description. And so, when set to come with three questions are: what is life, biology is special, is capable of evolving question? If the answers in reverse order: we know that matter is capable of evolving, because biology is made of matter and materials chemistry to do things. And if we do things outside of biology in general are changing, so we know how special it is. And lead us to the question of what life is.

So it would be an example of things in general?

All the things we have on Earth that does not replicate.

So I would like to convert the material world into the world of the living?

• We can use the phenomenon of changes to improve things, and the discovery of new materials, devices or systems. And this has a profound effect on himself. Not only can you develop a completely new technology, but that might be able to understand how we got here first
Even a few decades ago, scientists thought that life was very difficult to assemble from scratch and was successful once-in-a-universe. But really, I think, and I am not alone in this thought, the emergence of life on Earth is also likely that the emergence of life elsewhere. And there are many forms of life in the universe, but on Earth, we are limited by our tendency carbon and organic chemistry, organic chemistry, because it works very well here. If we were able to prove our assertion that biology is a general phenomenon, not only on the basis of the organic, as we know there is probably life in the universe.

What I am saying is that all the world can come alive, just done in different ways. And indeed, in this universe has life based on silicon iron or -. We can not conceive

How are you trying to prove biology is a general phenomenon?

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