Advanced Research on the Origin of Life

Contemporary Science Issues and Innovations May,2010

Science for the Public visits the famous Jack Szostak Lab at Harvard University/Massachusetts General Hospital to talk with two young scientists, Matthew Powner, Ph.D. and Itay Budin, about their origins of life research.

The lab of Nobel Laureate Jack Szostak, Ph.D. is a leading source of research on the origin of life and on the development of a synthetic cell. In this program two young scientists at the Szostak Lab explain their work on different aspects of life origins.

Matthew Powner, PhD.is a Research Fellow, Harvard Medical School /Massachusetts General Hospital/ Harvard Origins of Life Initiative. Dr. Powner explains his widely recognized research on one of the most difficult problems in the study of life’s origins: how the nucleotides for RNA might have developed.

Itay Budin is a Ph.D. student in the department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard University. He demonstrates his prize-winning experiment that revealed the possible origin of the cell membrane.