great distinct pleasure on my part to welcome to the program robert shapiro ph d chemists a chemist in the chemistry department new york university and the author of a book we're talking now in  september two thousand and eight is an offer on the author of a book that i want to show at the outset maybe you can look at it it's a program we did with him when this book came out twenty two years ago and it's called the origin origins and you want to give us the subtitle robert the skeptics guide to the creation of life on earth creation of life on earth how did we get to the point where there were organic process these  this rd planet in this particular solar system a huge singularity is subject of great importance leading researcher in this very important field that continues is a lot has been going on since this book was published and we talked on it two years ago i'm so happy to be able to get a chance to catch up with you and all your research for you and your colleagues thank welcome welcome very much truly i wonder maybe we could we get fifty eight minutes and there maybe you could share just a little bit of your own background you have a distinguished career and i want to you could share that and then we could get into a discussion of the theme of origins and then the issues involved and then some of the research finding that you had in the intervening years that the book what your show to this is the robert shapiro hour so please ok i was born and grew up in the bronx graduate of city college went on from there to graduate school at harvard where i had the privilege graduate school at harvard at harvard in chemistry yes organic chemistry yes and he was the man who made for the st time such molecules with cholesterol and strychnine and then vitamin b twelve and for those another accomplishments he got the nobel prize so he really knew how to mix chemicals in a lab and steer the chemicals in a particular direction to make something that nature also knew how to make you know it was taught how to show how the atoms who put together ok without knowing how the atoms were put together you can even start to build the model of the hilux isn't it interesting how one thing builds on another doesn't it you know absolutely so and  telescoping it seems to me robert that every day a new revolution comes in over the transom from every feel all around us is an incredibly exciting time in terms of our accumulation of our understanding the workings of nature and reality yeah and that's especially true for the field which people call genomics which is actually working out how the information content that is in our genes how it's stored and what it's fellows out rhyme and it's literally spelled out in a string of letters four of them for you know just as the english language is spelled out in twenty six letter has he says and commas and so  twenty three chromosomes in amazing it's just amazing and you take it you seem to have a very good appetite for understanding big questions oh i listen to good dress big paradigm in things which i congratulate you for and you've been interested for a long time and instead in addition to just chemical chemistry and that sort of thing in a more you know understandable way understanding the dimensions of an umbrella but you're interested in such a question is the origin of life how did we get from three organic pre you know from from the chemicals that made up the primordial soup or  whatever to where st the beginnings of what was to lead to organic process these happened a huge question singularity and that's something you've been interested in for a long time well well enough ok so ok so you're going on technically i'm a professor emeritus but i'm also a senior research scientist yes which means that i still have my office and graduate students still publi just don't have to do a lot of teaching anymore well it's good to leave you time for the research in the right and you're interested and you develop this interest is that something you when you were coming up as a young man you were studying chemistry were you interested in these larger issues then or was it a full task just to get the complement of the skill and knowledge of chemistry itself which is a huge field but the ultimate questions that you deal with in origins and in your work was that something that was thought of or discuss by your colleagues and that sort of thing the way in biology they might have been talking about evolution or d n a and so forth i just curious well it's an interesting story certainly is inherently so yeah i know a lot about d n a r n a seventy my and even to today my main scientific area has been trying to figure out why certain chemicals can disrupt d n a you know where that ultimately leads the cancer ok other chemicals do not do that in the world we're trying to figure out why certain chemicals are very hazardous and others are innocuous huge subject oh yeah that is a big question which i'm still occupied  with but in the middle of that when i had gotten that career development award from the and i h which took me off teaching for a time so a time think about other things a friend of mine who had known as a teenager was chairman of the department of physics up at columbia came to me and said i want to write a book about what kind of life there might be in the universe but i need a biologist to write this with me you need a biologist and i am a chemist immersed in biology right over here studying d n a you get immersed in biology indeed indeed yeah and he said i need such a person to write the book with me because i know all of the physical theory but i need someone who knows the nuts and bolts so i really admire this person love the idea of polymath and wonderful birds and he did us the compliment of saying that if he were going to be stranded on a desert island and could only take one science book with him to read he would have taken life beyond earth no fooling what a wonderful thing from him that would have programmed with him once and he had studied everything you'd written on everything you had five hundred books you published in there was only one thing that was beyond his can he would study astrophysics and everything  art all kinds ever in their only one thing that he could one discipline that he could not do you want to guess what it is i'll tell you why i couldn't he could not fathom economic theory he could not yet economics is what informs broadly most of the institutions that our world as we understand but it was very interesting he just couldn't get his mind around it you know but use of wonderful man and he became a friend would it be fair to say well disciplines away from the one you're specialized india of a comprehensive view of things do you find it interesting to talk to artists musicians a wide variety of people you can associate with and get important information from in terms of your research remember now i made the point where that and then the vedas have been telling is a seamless web everything's interconnected and it's all one whole system that were part of so that there are no academic disciplines in reality everything is interconnected who was it that wrote i'm sorry just scripts my mind now the famous one who made the point about the art in the sciences and it'll come to me later but anyway  kind you have a comprehensive kind of approach to understanding things as opposed to a read specialist then toward specializing in you're looking for paradigms and big system thinking apparently otherwise you can get stuck in some very trivial even a fascinating and you stay there forever missing that's right never fear yeah you know and then it and it also makes life a little more interesting and everything like that i know you've just come back i know from a conference that was held by a lot of your colleagues that are interested in these questions of the origin of life in europe that was a good opportunity to intermingle with them and so forth and you keep working it was twenty two years ago that we did that program originally about your book it was fascinating then and it's you the work is continuing you've been writing other things there was an article could i reference to recently within the last year or so in scientific american and it what with the title was your simpler origin for life a simpler origin have you developed new ideas or new in a paradigm sense about the question in the intervening years from when this book was written and now or when you published the article in scientific american are there new things developing in your thought process or your understanding of the process by which  was chemically very unbelievable but it was widely accepted it was widely accepted by people who really weren't organic chemists and didn't know the chemistry of the competing a and r and and the complexity of it and then when there's somebody out of anyone they had something to do with play oh he's a good friend of mine ok amor karen smith and i just spent well it was i guess two weeks ago now yeah i just found the conference changes in your thinking based upon the definitely changes in my own thinking yes because i came in what you might say through a negative direction ok that is i looked at the science and i looked at the leading theory in the field which i thought was eighty percent of the people subscribe to and i said this makes no sense it isn't good chemistry and then i said i have to try and convince my colleagues the people in this field of this fact the same time i was very taken by the great sweep and color of it and the very many charismatic characters who passed through it and the great divergence e u all kinds of theories and so i wrote the book origins to try to cover the entire field in the spectacular variety of thoughts that there have been through history and how life began yeah and you and you want to also make it available to the citizens like myself or the general society i can graduate you and thank you for that pact in terms of presenting your understanding yeah and i tried to be they call it what they called even handed in that i gave space to each thievin turn and if i found it lacking in some way i would try to point that out but you know with space for everybody well that that that that that serves well the scientific method but don't you think you want to have a wide variety of possibilities and then put it to the most rigorous test exactly and let it stand or fall and that's what you've been doing yeah then however i really  decided that i had a back up my speculations in that book with more convincing hardcore chemical arguments not necessarily intended for the is pre pre living people try to go to d n a and everything but it's early i mean it's getting to the earliest kind of bacteria or something maybe you could spell it out what maybe spell that out in fact for the general audiences viewing now what it  bacteria or germs that you call you call it and takes you on there through the entire story of evolution which you're going to get to the bacteria then yes i say yes and most books and most arguments have really dealt with evolution you know a much more difficult problem is going from inanimate non living matter to the st bacteria to the st bacteria or component parts of bacteria or well component parts of bacteria point eight b somewhere between three billion seven hundred and thirty million years ago this was taking place younger just to put it in a time perspective normally yet to go the whole distance the universe i think hellish place you know things erupting more rocks coming and volcanoes lightning you have it but from our studies of moon rocks on the surface of them on this evidence that the bombardment have a situation is different than the one that we can get from maybe they've disappeared as i'm but i had an effect on that or not there's possible outside intervention from the universe beyond earth itself or i make getting up base i mean that's one of the theories some of the theories could be involved in terms of certain processes these couldn't be understand just from the elements that we understand the distinction our maybe i should just not stopped i should stop talking because i'm not sure what i'm talking about no you're talking some famous scientists the idea that maybe life didn't start here at all maybe it started elsewhere and the universe and arrives under arrest for the st time taking a ride on an he was a near nobel prize winner earnings work on how elements came together in star us to form heavier elements and i was knighted by the queen who became sir fred hoyle and they had about every author except a nobel prize that one could wish for but then as he got to a certain stage in his career he took off and strange directions and my origins book i had a lot of fun yeah reading things he'd written in this while the moments and perhaps didn't expect anyone else would come upon but he would say things for example such as that the reason that human beings st emerged from the jungle was while they were not out into the open plains and then they started to catch diseases from viruses from outer space oh i think what they were able to colonize  know r n a st or what do you think is the one or ones you're investigating now and ones who you think are emerging out of the many people who are interested in this question you're in touch with virtually the entire community on the planet i guess the people who are interested in this what seems to be the collective understanding of things now in the year two thousand and eight well i think my st serious offense papers plus pay for is by other scientists may be a kissing cousin that was something simpler and could have been put together on the early earth so a whole slew of paper came papers came out publishing r n a substitutes and they call that a pre r n a precursor elements or conditions or projections of maybe altered states of vironment or something that are part of these paradigms as they're put forth if you understand what i'm saying and all the point y the st with the very st thing that happened you know with the beginning of it all i'm getting to a good good having to read yeah yeah it's a huge question and helps me concentrate if i can sort of follow this through go ahead and are the point is that each of these substitutes was also wildly improbable ok and i kept publishing papers criticizing everything or making speeches till some of the graduate students began to call me dr no skeptic with an underlining and make nasty comments that i like to knock things over but i never make a suggestion myself so that around the year two thousand let's say i decided that it wasn't enough just to knock over like so many bowling pins running a leading theory but it was also perhaps responsibility to try and puts help put something in its place part of the scientific method so i began to read more deeply into the many papers published by a variety of scientists i can name a but they weren't pulling together and each of the theories had some hole in it was something missing but if you looked at them all together you could sort of cobble together the various pieces and make a family yeah yeah i wonder if i had learned your theory yeah even though i myself hadn't created these i was right trying to put it together and i found that they were missing the ingredient of what i call a flow of energy because in the beginning you feel like you who were just small molecules like the amino acids that performed in a famous experiment by stallion miller electricity was used electricity to have them and there were lots of other small molecules and you needed to get these small molecules to somehow cooperate together and get like going without having the marvelous properties that such big molecules as r n a  and a lot of people would put forward stories have how life began or even r n a began as a narrative saying st this happened and then that happened and then another thing happened and another thing happened and my friend graham can smith would call them just so story and because they sounded like the pal of how the leopard got its spots a had to happen and b had to happen and c and d and e is there some  part of a process that could be used for well think of you're driving home from the studio yeah i don't know where you live which bore me penn station well that's that's pretty easy yeah but good now suppose you lived a little further away scarsdale it's an army great neck where i live well if you know where you're going and you have the set of instructions it's easy to make a right turn here or a left turn here oh yeah take the highway and you can really get it but if you have no instructions at all then you're liable to end up anywhere right now the secret of all the experiments that led them was said to prove that nature could make r n a was really the fact that the chemists and their laboratories were making it happen they were mixing a with b and then mixing c in just the right amount and then adding yet another ingredient you know doing everything it's like cooking a dinner yeah yeah yeah it's one thing to follow a recipe and look up a dinner and it's another thing to let a wild boar into the kitchen when you have the greedy and scattered around and expect thanksgiving yeah had energy acting in a very specific way with some of the components of this mixture making just one reaction happened which i call a driver reaction well that would be a very favorable reaction  but if you could somehow stumble into a situation where energy couldn't be discharged unless it helped all of these molecules can always record as it incenses whatever it is protected from that is that right or no right ok something like that had to happen at the level of molecules at the molecule molecular yeah the energy coming through how to interact with one particular chemical reaction just the way a flowing river interacts with a water wheel and i felt if one could only identify that reaction well that would then make everything else happen because the energy in order to discharge itself which it wants to do would have to turn the wheel and for the wheels to turn something else would have to happen and eventually you would get the system organized or just yes just the molecules arranging themselves to help the energy discharge and the energy in turn helping to cause the molecules to arrange themselves you get a feedback system and he was helping the bee was helping and and i just wrote this out and it seemed to make good sense to me but i'm not a  every year before that i could not list a much more technical version of the same thing in the quarterly review of biology ok because i think you have to really show the nuts and bolts and the technical details and i got a lot of good feedback from people from a variety of fields on economics economics wrote ecology rely on it all of the same that my dears had application in their areas isn't that interesting yeah and happened well like a that's good but what also hasn't happened is that the people in the field haven't set up their laboratories and started to do experiments to try to find that wanted me to specify the exact chemical mixture in order to do it you know when i read what had been written and a lot of people suggested very specific chemical mixtures and they tried to put in that exact mixture and it hadn't worked and then they try another exact mixture and that hadn't quite work and i got the idea that  we don't have to specify it in advance that if we give nature a chance to instruct us ok it will teach us ravin we trying to force nature how do we do that how is that  l this is what i try to put up two weeks ago do we go from now i mean we're right on the right yeah it's ok as the very last poster in my presentation at his o you want to point or you can point it out this is just a couple weeks old you put it so young and the idea is that all you need to do is put in a mixture of simple chemicals such as were around on the earlier us that you'd have to know what that yeah you know you could try from oxygen which if we put a match to this paper would go happily it's going to defrag yeah but there are many other chemicals that are more controllable that can release chemical energy and i react chemical energy so you could have your mixture and then let it stew for a while and after a while you take out a sample and analyze it and see what you got in various bad things could happen st as every student over again a chemistry knows you can have your whole flask whether that has or has not occurred i mean there's no problem with that methodological level yeah as cuz the equipment exists in every organic chemistry lab ok really good variance in these test tubes ok so you could follow the progress event from test t rust technically called a serial transfer experiment ok and if people would simply set up simple mixes of ingredients with an energy source after awhile you would start to see it take off and start to cooperate and evolve and instead of getting a mess of chemicals only a few chemicals would emerge and they would take over the next or are you are you suggesting that people may be an organic chemistry labs across the country might consider taking note of this i am suggesting exactly that i was already in a organic chemistry level lab across the country we want to take careful note of this bridge tension very carefully to this fellow robert shapiro and set up ok you just have to have the ability to analyze all of the chemicals that are in the mixture and you can make that available to people who want to try this what it is that reply i am like a template you could set up a template for setting it up and they could you  testing it all around the world well absolutely it technically to do the job thoroughly you need what's called a gas chromatograph mass spectrometer is that rare no it's present in almost every organic chemistry how many organic chemistry labs are there with that kind of equipment across the planet over the place ten million two hundred and ten thousand that a lot you know and this is a this is a meaningful thing that you think just two weeks ago you came up with my correct two weeks ago i a gathering of the people they're interested in this particular very singular significant meth method of research what did they have any over lunch over dinner anything after you done it did they say that really makes sense or what would it be published if it's something that is not able to be accepted by the gatekeepers of the established canon well i think st the polite thing to do is to give it to the gatekeepers of the established can and then see what is there with some reason the gatekeepers of canon were the ones running this meeting in florida oh well you know so i think they may not have been so disciplined to please and i kept asking questions from the floor but they is something that's worthwhile toward getting at the ultimate question you've been so concerned with your other young i think of people i no longer maintain elaborate of people who do would tackle this open ended lee i think we would have at least the start of an the tape now then they can do that and this may be able to the internet is a marvelous way of exchanging or putting out ideas and so forth this really makes sense to you and you've been doing it are you encouraged it we're moving closer and closer through time let's just say time in a simple not three billion seven hundred million years ago but say two thousand and twenty two years ago when we did the program what origin are we making progress toward getting at this alternate philosopher stone understanding of such an important thing is organic beginning on this planet and how does this relate to the broader issues i know you have an interest in in the conditions where this might be a political will to other places in our solar system or be ok we got two questions there ok the question one is are we making progress and i hope so yeah because of many origin of life conferences they now do give a place for this other theory which yeah i know i know but you don't stand when i'm saying no i mean well it's going from organic they have organic chemistry and the a p cam and you have this kind of thing organic chemistry and chemistry everything chemical we started out saying everything is chemical in the way and there's an important breakpoint there you know you understand well at a basic level yes you have to really confront the question about how simple chemicals if you give them the energy source instead of making a mass will start to get organized we'll see what we call the energy source within a system in a sense you're not talking of the sun is shining there's energy i mean you know i don't quite understand the energy source if you just ignorant but you're talking about like you said lifted you have a you have a way in which there is a discharge or there's a move toward entropy and you brought in thermodynamics and so forth so all of those things involve the energy source in terms of this experiment magazine said why if he had left his machine on for a one million years the st living thing would have caught out of there but the trouble is the energy was now not interacting with the chemicals anymore  interacting with an empty space so my comment was that if he'd left his machine on for a one million years he would have run up one huge electric bill but nothing else and then for sort of half and thank you got it yeah yeah and if you have to keep interacting yeah and intermixing with the chemicals and you become involved in the field of thermodynamics or unwilling or use it in a very simple way and people have written to me and sent me they said we started from your system and i can say very pretty and i hope it's right yeah not my department right right i just use the simple ideas and i'm glad that you didn't find anything wrong with them and building on them somewhere about this saying we only got a couple few minutes left what about this idea that these processes that we can it it's such a huge thing you know it goes back over such a great expanse of time but other places where it might not be depp's mars or or some other places in the universe where that might be more it isn't such a necessarily miraculous thing only to this particular planet in a solar system it might be a process we could understand nathan or whatever stages coming out of the evidence of what happened here yeah yeah because this idea sort of connects the origin of life to the bane body of science and connects it directly to thermodynamics and attics and other very all kinds of mixtures of chemicals and all kinds of sources of energy could work to get life started and life becomes a very much more probable thing if you will where you already write a follow on that life is very improbable and this might be the only place in the whole universe where it exist this idea or metabolism for us and the simpler origin is correct why i think you go to a place like titan where they seem to have titan jupiter yeah yeah they seem to have all of the ingredients in place they have some sources of energy and we going on a radio beaver something like that but it's really interesting and what you come to then rather than aryan st you come to a certain metabolism for small molecules for small molecules for simple things such as we know conform wish you all the very best of the research and i encourage all your organic chemist to get busy in the lab with this thing that doctors suggesting and it's been your pleasure i'm sorry we go on talking and it's really interesting stuff most one of the most important questions is the origin of life and we may say so treat him right down there new york university and in there a broader scientific world beyond gays a major source of major information and he's very interested in trying to convey it to us for which i appreciate you very much in terms of the work of all your colleagues and yourself thanks again very much enormously my pleasure hemming in your pleasure please today we're coming