composed of the remains of organisms that grew in the ocean again around about a hundred fifty million years ago and it's very clear when you analyze the material in in this particular sample we know that rock was formed in shallow water we have a very good handle on its age is it about eight hundred million years and the fact that it's not twisted bent on range tells us that it's not been subject to extreme weather and unfortunately the rocks that we would most like to study are really really old rocks and you can see this case that those rocks are distorted they they're broken they weathered that probably be colonized several times by more recent organisms very it's very very difficult and problematic to get chemical fossils from a rock like this but there are small amounts of organic and we can get there are some there are some big patterns and from that we we hope to be able to at least say something about the likelihood that this was formed by biological processes or otherwise currently investigating hoping to isolate and characterize some of the oldest organic matter that's been discovered on this planet this particular rock here now to come in contact with oxygen produced by focusing they all but it's intended organisms living at the surface of the ocean and essentially that ongoing rusty becoming insoluble and sinking to the bottom of the ocean and initially as a sort of jelly like substance and subsequently becoming a little foil forming a solid rock and this particular rock is very very fine banding if you see this in understand how this process happened what were the original organisms that learned how to produce oxygen from water when did they learn how to do that with a fish and what happened to keep mizzen the greatest problems into your biology there are a number of very very important consequences for the for the trajectory of life that are related to the oxygen in the atmosphere ocean system and in of course one of them is oxygen when you use oxygen to burn sugars you achieve a lot more energy from that process than you would if you exciting research activity to work with lots of other people people who know about biology people who know about you know makes people who know about g chemistry and geology the age of rocks putting all eyes small snippets of information together to reconstruct as best we can history of life on earth so the rocks that i've been showing you i'm up to now are rocks that come from different parts of the earth quite a number of them come from a straight up was a source of organic carbon compounds provided to the planet from the interstellar medium and for many years people have been looking at rocks like this looking for evidence with very interested in the chemistry of rocks we're interested in the chemistry of rocks that are being formed in them in the bottom of the ocean at the present time but we're also very interested in rocks that were formed at the bottom of preparation of samples isolation of materials minerals organic matter that sort of thing from rocks like this the other side of the laboratory maybe i did hear the noise all analytical instruments so each one of these instruments that you can see on this side is a mass spectrometer molecules that we're analyzing and on curiosity on the same instrument there are six of these columns with different qualities that are to do different kinds of separation experiments that we wish to do but this particular type of column is one that was used for the first they've taken organic molecules that we think or we're pretty confident that version of these but the advantage of having a machine as complicated as this we can vary the conditions of the experiment according to what we've fallen on mas improve the quality of the experiment improve the fidelity of the experiment brought information for the next sort of planning stage hal the next experiments going to be done on miles one of the important things about making sense of the results that we get from curiosity is whether or not the experiments are reproducible and a key element of the analog experiments is that people in different of our entries can do the experiment the same way and get the same result so there are people at johnson use it requires the same kind of lighting software lighting samples as as happens on mars so it's it's limited in the number of experiments it can do we can do  three or four experiments and i we can do hundreds of experiments and i as can people at johnson's fights in it so what we lack in fidelity operating on a mosque in addition is we can make up for in being able to do many many more experiments on the quite different conditions and therefore build up a set of information with a set of data that helps us interpret the results that are gone before but also plan experiments for the future on mas so that there will be conducted to achieve the most important information will get the most important information from any particular sample and this also involves working closely with the other team members on curiosity the geologists the ga chemists the business is it's a very much a team a team with experience none of us know enough of very very expensive scientific equipment in this lab are a tree and a lot of people operating that equipment in order to maintain a tree like this we're very dependent on the on this earth we're particularly working on the advent of animal life complex multi cellular animals and how they came to be what conditions of the earth existed that allowed complex life  form and to flourish you know that complex life in itself changed the surface of the planet life and the planet three evolution not so delicately with wind it's impossible in some cases funding we also rely on some private foundations currently we're being supported by that simons foundation collaboration on the all regions of life so in that project we're looking at the earl drilling projects only earth that allows us to get very fresh samples from critical intervals of time in south africa and mice recently from australia so combinations of funding six or seven years is we need to be making sure that that those funding sources a stable the sufficient man of time for people to do they would and bring it bring it to a fruition  criticism is about is tasting continually tasting your results or the reproducibility finessing experiments it's that that that you are able show to be absolutely confident the result is correct and many many many experiments are required in order to be confident result and have your colleagues be also i convinced that th so once upon a time if you wanted to career in science you went to graduate school and got a ph d and you got a faculty position and that was that and that's not the situation anymore there are very very few tenure track  faculty positions relative to the number of students who begin a career in the sciences and so the postdoc is an important part of that training process it's a part of that pipeline nowadays it's pretty much standard for a p graduates to to do a post doc to receive further training either in their field of specialization that they were in for their ph d program or in my case it's been a great opportunity to learn a whole new skill set and to sort of expand my my skills and experiences so my background is actually in paleontology trained as a geologist and did my ph d research on what we can learn about the process of evolution from microfossils and since coming here i've been able to undertake  a big transition from working in an out of really different field of organic chemistry and so i've been involved in the curiosity mission analog work that we do in the lab here i've been able to to learn a whole new skill set of operating at the instruments that we used to conduct those like experiments here making synthetic samples of martians adamant and analyzing them to help us better understand and interpret the  data coming from the mars rover and the experiments that are being carried out on mars i'm very fortunate to have a second role in my job here at mit alongside research as an educator and a science communicator and so of this of this institute and so i get to work in collaboration with with lots of different organizations in cambridge and in the greater boston area and also across the country with partners in the nasa astrobiology institute to bring the science in the research that we're doing to the general public through the education system and also through informal science education efforts so for example we work together with the science club for girls here in cambridge we work with the m collaboration with partners at arizona state university on a series of virtual field trips or online learning experiences that allow students and high school classrooms middle school classrooms but also the general public it's very useful in my research it's very useful for education but it's also a broad general skill set that i think is going to be useful in the rest of my career where for that takes me