Origins of Life: RNA or DNA or both?

I have written about this scientific question before. How did DNA (more stable than RNA) come to be the primary information-store for living things?

Because we don’t have access to the early Earth, the question of how life arose on our planet remains obscure. But here is a new experimental result. The authors address the question of how RNA and DNA came to exist. These are of course the polymer molecules that store the information required to construct “Life”. The blueprint, if you will.

The elegant wet-lab experiments show how the letters of the RNA and DNA alphabet can be synthesized with the correct handedness (chirality for those with chemistry backgrounds) under conditions thought to exist on our Earth at the time that life originated.

The article is in Nature, so it’s behind their firewall. But the abstract is free to read.

Your theory and mine….

One of the major problems for scientists, when they communicate–whether with the public or with their colleagues–is language. Even within disciplines, a word can mean different things to different scholars. We tend to label that whole set of issues somewhat trivially by telling our trainees to avoid using “jargon”. But the problem is larger than that.

An example: the word “theory”. For the general public (and many of the direct stakeholders for science), the word means “best guess”. In a TV detective drama, the hero has a theory for who committed the crime which may or may not be correct. For scientists however, theory has a different meaning altogether: it means something that has been settled over time by numerous experiments from independent scientists–the Earth orbits around the Sun, is “theory” in the language of scientists. It’s been tested experimentally and by observation many times; the answer has come back consistently; the world of science has arrived at consensus that this statement is fact.

So when scientists communicate with the public and use their version of “theory” for talking about something like “evolution” or “climate change”, the public doesn’t hear what the scientist thinks they are hearing. Instead, what is heard is that: this is my idea of what is true. It may be correct. It may not be. But it’s my best guess.

That’s a big problem.

So what language do scientists use for the public’s version of the word “theory”? I suppose “hypothesis” covers part of it, but that word, in science, also has the implicit requirement that the hypothesis be testable using experimentation. Lots of physicists are enamored with String Theory, but it’s not really a hypothesis because there is no current way to really test it.

And by the way, String Theory is a scientific misnomer because it is “theory” in the public sense of the word, not the scientific operational definition.

In any case, what passes for the scientific version of the public word “theory” usually goes into the Discussion section of a scientific paper. That’s the part of a publication where the scientific “detective” is telling what she thinks is happening–and it may or not be correct.

In general you can trust scientific data. But what goes into the Discussion section, that’s just “theory”. In the public sense.

Hantavirus and climate change

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

When I first came to NSF to head up the Biological Sciences Directorate, I learned about a very interesting connection between climate change and human disease. Now hantaviruses are carried by rodents. In the Western Hemisphere, they cause serious cardiopulmonary disease in humans. In the Eastern Hemisphere, these viruses result in haemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome. The point is that their rodent hosts as migrating as the climate changes, so there are places in the US that now have the human disease that previously didn’t. You can read about that here.

Why am I writing about hantaviruses? Because it is a clearcut example where a viral-borne diseases affects a new, previously naive human population as a result of climate disruption. When species that act as reservoirs for viruses change their habitat to escape a warming climactic temperature, they act as vectors. Just as significant to public health as infected humans jumping on commercial airliners. For more on this notion in the context of COVID19, see here.

COVID30

Human society will probably survive the current pandemic. I’m assuming that the massive global stresses that are currently revealing underlying weaknesses and faultiness don’t lead to global war. There are no guarantees there. But I’m not at all convinced that we will be any more prepared for future pandemics following the human experience with this one. For us to learn positively from this experience, we’ll need to think about human health completely outside the geopolitical lens. So far that approach, a planetary one, has eluded us both in the context of COVID19 and the larger context of climate disruption.

Because the biosphere doesn’t recognize national boundaries, a nationalistic approach for these larger issues won’t work. So nations are going to have to find a way to put their disputes in abeyance for these planetary emergencies. Looking at our current crop of leaders across the globe, I don’t see that kind of vision. We’re going to have grow a new generation of folks who can think at the level of planet, while simultaneously leading a Westphalian state. This is a very different type of idea from the federalism here in the US or in the EU.

Although, if there are such individuals, my guess is that they’ll be found among our current state governors and mayors–as they collectively try their best to deal with the lousy hand they’ve been dealt.

What I’ve been up to….

My primary effort has been on COVID19. Our latest papers are here and here. We are primarily interested in the connection between the host receptor for the virus, Angiotensin Converting Enzyme II and the nicotinic receptor for the neurotransmitter, acetylcholine.

I’m also deeply involved in an NSF project on AI at the Edge, called SAGE. Which in turn is highly connected to the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), which I worked very hard on while I was at NSF.

Finally, I am leading a team working on using NEON environmental microbiome data to explore how continental-scale deposited nitrogen gradients may affect the trajectory of our biosphere.

A Hot Mess…

Yes, we are in a world of trouble. But it’s also an opportunity to think big about what needs to change and what we might want in a new world to come. Here’s a terrific piece by Marilynne Robinson in the NYRB. There’s a lot for those of us who are in the public academy, but there is also something of an optimistic spark that I think we all need.

Money quote:

The theory that supports all this is taught in the universities. Its terminology is economic but its influence is broadly felt across disciplines because it is in fact an anthropology, a theory of human nature and motivation. It comes down to the idea that the profit motive applies in literally every circumstance, inevitably, because it is genetic in its origins and its operations. “Selfishness,” its exponents call it, sometimes arguing that the word in this context has a special meaning, though the specifics of the sanitizing are unclear. 

What Kind of Country Do We Want, Marilynne Robinson, New York Review of Books

University of Alaska Fiscal Crisis

It is well known that states have systematically de-invested in their public universities over the past couple of decades. The current governor of the state of Alaska, Mike Dunleavy,  has taken this trend to a new extreme however by putting in place a 41% cut to the University of Alaska which will cause the Research 1 university to run out of money four months before the end of its current fiscal year.

The University of Alaska is unique because it houses a critical mass of this country’s arctic research. When I was at NSF, the Director and I site visited many of these facilities and the top notch scientists who conduct their research at them. It was clear that this arctic research infrastructure represents an important national resource for this country (and the world) as it adapts to climate disruption–which is accelerated in the arctic.

Jim Johnsen, the President of the UofA system has just put forward some possible responses to the cuts and here is a summary of those ideas from Inside Higher Education. His actual slide deck is here. From my own experience as an academic leader, I am more inclined towards either the first or the last of the three scenarios. Better to make a change that is strategic (and initially very painful) than to proportionately cut everything.

But the larger question is why politics has gotten to the point of self-harm for the sake of symbolism and gut satisfaction. A world class public research university is an economic innovation engine to a state–both California and Texas come to mind as exemplars of this magnet effect. There are many others. I don’t have the answer to this, but it’s not just happening inside the US: UK science will be significantly harmed by a no-deal Brexit of the type Boris Johnson (the brand new PM) has potentially committed to if the EU does not agree to his renegotiation demands. The new President of Mexico is proposing massive cuts to science in his country.

Oddly, one nation continues to invest in science as if there is no tomorrow: China.