Quotes from Nick Lane

Our terminal decline into old age and death stems from the fine print of the contract that we signed with our mitochondria two billion years ago.

All complex life shares an astonishing catalogue of elaborate traits, from sex to cell suicide to senescence, none of which is seen in a comparable form in bacteria.

Buchner proposed that fermentation was carried out by biological catalysts that he named enzymes (from the Greek en zyme, meaning in yeast). He concluded that living cells are chemical factories, in which enzymes manufacture the various products.

Well, biology is not only about genes and environment, but also cells and the constraints of their physical structure, which we shall see have little to do with either genes or environment directly. The predictions that arise from these disparate world views are strikingly different.

When a molecule of vitamin C encounters a free radical, it becomes oxidised and thereby renders the free radical innocuous. The oxidised vitamin C then gets restored to its non-oxidised state by an enzyme called vitamin C reductase. It is like a boxer who goes into the ring, takes a hit to his jaw, goes to his corner to recover, and then does it all over again.

Our terminal decline into old age and death stems from the fine print of the contract that we signed with our mitochondria two billion years ago.

Every day in the human body, some 10 billion cells die and are replaced by new cells. The cells that die do not meet a violent unpremeditated end, but are removed silently and unnoticed by apoptosis, all evidence of their demise eaten by neighbouring cells. This means that apoptosis balances cell division

I will argue that energy has constrained the evolution of life on earth; that the same forces ought to apply elsewhere in the universe; and that a synthesis of energy and evolution could be the basis for a more predictive biology, helping us understand why life is the way it is, not only on earth, but wherever it might exist in the universe.

it's no mystery that all cells here on earth should be chemiosmotic. I would expect that cells across the universe will be chemiosmotic too.

Sex is far more widespread than seems reasonable.

Hermaphroditic species such as flatworms go to bizarre lengths to avoid being inseminated, fighting pitched battles with their penises, their semen burning gaping holes in the vanquished. This is lively natural history, but it is circular as an argument, as it takes for granted that there are greater biological costs to being female.

Mitochondria, as we have seen, are only passed on in the egg, so all 13 mitochondrial genes come from our mothers. If these genes really do influence lifespan, and we can only inherit them from our mothers, then our own lifespan should reflect that of our mothers but not our fathers.

and predictions. Science is often presented as 'the facts', frequently in

In an average person, ATP is produced at a rate of 9 × 1020 molecules per second, which equates to a turnover rate (the rate at which it is produced and consumed) of about 65 kg every day.

Genius, it is said, is the ability to see the obvious before anyone else.4

Ribosomes have an error rate of about one letter in 10,000, far lower than the defect rate in our own high-quality manufacturing processes. And they operate at a rate of about 10 amino acids per second, building whole proteins with chains comprising hundreds of amino acids in less than a minute.

the greatest mutational health hazard in the population is fertile old men. Thankfully, uniparental inheritance means that men don't pass on their mitochondria at all.

but mammals have at their disposal ten times the resources, they

Timmis and colleagues found that chloroplast genes are transferred to the nucleus at a rate of about 1 transfer in every 16 000 seeds in the tobacco plant Nicotiana tabacum. This may not sound impressive, but a single tobacco plant produces as many as a million seeds in a single year, which adds up to more than 60 seeds in which at least one chloroplast gene has been transferred to the nucleus—in every plant, in every generation.

Core metabolism has changed little in part because it was never powered down in its four-billion-year history. The genes are custodians of this flame, but without the flame life is – dead.

NASA 'working definition' of life, for example: life is 'a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution'.

Peter Medawar described a hypothesis as an imaginative leap into the unknown. Once the leap is taken, a hypothesis becomes an attempt to tell a story that is understandable in human terms.

Once the little squirt has found a suitable home, it attaches itself soundly to the spot and then, needing it no longer, reabsorbs its own brain (a feat that arouses much admiration among university professors, Steve Jones quips).

I hope to persuade you that energy is central to evolution, that we can only understand the properties of life if we bring energy into the equation.