1998 Tanaka looks to 'Flubber' for clues to life's beginning Physics professor Toyoichi Tanaka believes that substances that look and act like Flubber may hold the key to how life began.
Gels are oddly lifelike substances somewhere between a solid and a liquid.
About 20 years ago, Professor Tanaka, the Otto and Jane Morningstar Professor of Science, found that both synthetic and natural gels change phases in response to changes in their environment, much like water turning to vapor and back again. He is now looking to gels to provide a clue to the baffling puzzle of how life on Earth began. Life boils down to amino acids. They line up in chains called polymers. A gel is a polymer, a long chain of identical monomers, or molecules, that are cross-linked like a web of fibers.