ScienceKind: Information at the Dawn of Life – Jack Szostak

Speaker: Jack Szostak, Nobel laureate, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and University Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Chicago
When: Wednesday 14 October 2026, 9:30am Pacific, 12:30pm Eastern, 5:30pm UK
Where: online, Zoom Webinars. Free. Register at www.sciencekind.com

How did chemistry on the early Earth give rise to biology? Before cells, DNA or proteins existed, simple chemical systems had to copy themselves and pass information on to the next generation. RNA is a leading candidate for that first carrier of information. But copying RNA without enzymes is very error prone, and too many mistakes would destroy the information before evolution could begin. Jack Szostak will show experiments from his lab, using deep sequencing and studies of reaction kinetics, on how accurately RNA can be copied chemically, and how some surprisingly simple mechanisms may have filtered out the errors.