Gels can be engineered to clean up pollutants or oil spills. Even in cosmetics, gels could hold and then release key ingredients like fragrance in response to factors like skin pH. Gels can be used as soft valves or act as artificial muscles. It is those links, which allow a gel to capture water within them, that give gels their elasticity and fluidity. The fundamental principles that govern the swelling equilibrium and dynamics also turned out to be a powerful paradigm for understanding the molecular basis of polymer behaviors in general. Professor Tanaka was exploring the idea that gels may 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. Scientists can determine the sequence of amino acids that make up specific proteins, but they don't know how to make one from scratch. Professor Tanaka's laboratory is working on synthesizing a gel with characteristics similar to those of proteins capable of recognizing a target molecule. Some sort of prearrangement of the individual amino acid or nucleotide molecules that join together in a certain shape and sequence to make the polymer, possibly in the presence of some target molecule, can be easily imagined to exist in the primordial soup. The current theory holds that back in the Earth's early days, amino acids swimming around in a primordial soup randomly came together in a viable sequence.