The Cell (2009) s01e03 Episode Script
The Spark of Life
I'm about to look back to some of the earliest evidence of life on Earth.
Evidence trapped inside rocks from our planet's ancient past.
A time long before the dinosaurs.
Even before the first creatures appeared in the oceans, over 500 million years ago.
They are fossilised cells.
These cells are a staggering one billion years old.
It's now believed that all life on Earth emerged from one single primordial cell, perhaps not dissimilar to one of these.
Ever since, the spark of life has passed from cell to cell in a perfect, unbroken chain .
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with life adapting and evolving into the millions of species on our planet today.
Every single one of them can trace its origins back to that first cell.
But now, we are on the brink of something truly profound.
We may be about to create living cells from scratch.
If we succeed, it will be the first life-form on Earth that hasn't evolved from that original cell.
It will be the second genesis.
In all the billions of years that this planet has existed, only once did a cell survive to evolve into every living thing we have today.
That's quite a thought.
All life on Earth came from just one cell.
So how are scientists going to create life in a lab .
.
when nature only ever achieved this once? I've come to San Francisco to show you why the cell could become the most powerful tool on the planet.
Building cells in the lab sounds like science fiction, but scientists can already alter the cells that nature has made.
They can take cells that have evolved over billions of years and manipulate them in unbelievable ways.
Dr Stephen del Cardayre leads a team of scientists who have started with a bacterial cell and re-engineered its inner workings.
We've basically remodelled the cell.
We've taken a naturally occurring bacteria, E.
coli, and souped it up.
We are taking this microbe, the chassis of this organism.
It is analogous to building a monster truck.
We start with a small truck, this bacteria, and we pull off the original wheels and put in some big wheels.
Steve and his team have added new genetic components to the bacteria's ancient DNA.
'When they take this cell, with its modified DNA, and feed it sugar, 'the result is awesome.
' I just want to get to it! I want to see them!I wanna find a good place on the slide.
Stop there.
'This round thing is a blob of pure diesel oil.
' So these things here are the bacteria? You can see the rod shapes.
Yeah, there's one.
They're in the midst of, have just finished, converting renewable sugar to secreted, ultra-clean diesel.
It's an oil product.
'Feed sugar to these modified bacteria cells 'and they give you diesel oil.
' That big blob is simply oil? That's our ultra-clean diesel product, a finished product fuel.
We have to separate it, wash it a little bit and it's ready to go.
You're really blase about this, but that is completely nuts! You have got microbes producing diesel.
We're really excited about it! We've been working really hard on this.
The microbes have been working harder! This is revolutionary stuff.
Steve and his team have set up a test refinery where these manipulated bacteria are now producing just not just a few drops of oil, but gallons of it.
And this is what you end up with, in this case, pure diesel.
Just in case you think this is a hoax, watch this.
Look at that! Diesel power! Sensational! Just a couple of days ago that was just bacteria.
Now, it's running a diesel generator! That's the power of the cell.
Diesel power! What's happening here is a glimpse of what cells could do for us in the future.
As living machines, they have enormous powers.
Up to now, we have only been able to manipulate naturally-occurring cells.
But how much further could we go if we could actually create life, if we could build new cells from scratch? To do that, we'd have to solve a fundamental mystery - what gives a cell its spark of life? What turns lifeless chemicals into a living thing? The obvious starting point is to try to understand how life on Earth began in the first place.
So I'm beginning with a man who in 1859 published a theory that addressed the question of how life evolved .
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Charles Darwin.
These are Darwin's books that he owned.
'I've been given unprecedented access to his private library.
' This is an important book.
Am I allowed to touch these? I feel like I can't touch these things.
This is The Origin Of Species, the book in which Charles Darwin outlines the theory of evolution by natural selection.
But this copy is unique and totally priceless.
This is the first copy of the first edition, the one that the publisher sent to Darwin himself, hot off the press.
On page 484, there's a remarkable passage which gives an insight into what Darwin himself thought about the origins of life.
"All the organic beings which have ever lived on this Earth " have descended from some one primordial form "into which life was first breathed.
" This doesn't simply say that we humans have evolved from an ape-like ancestor.
It goes much further than that.
It suggested that all living things, from insects to elephants, from a hyacinth to a human, have evolved from one single common ancestor.
It flew in the face of the Bible's account of creation.
At the time, Darwin didn't propose a scientific explanation for what created this original life-form.
His notion that life was breathed into the primordial common ancestor left room for the Creator.
Yet Darwin's Origin Of Species introduced one of the most important thoughts in science - that all life on Earth sprung from one single organism.
But to know what that organism would have been, you have to turn to the other big idea around in Darwin's day.
It was the theory that cells form the basis of all living things.
When it was first proposed in the 1830s, this was a shocking revelation.
From Man, to flowers, to frogs, it showed we're all made up of the same building blocks.
By the time Darwin published his work on evolution, cell theory was the new bedrock of biology.
And crucially, scientists had shown that new cells are born only when existing cells divide.
All living cells are descended from other cells.
So, in just two decades in the 19th century, scientists had come up with the two biggest ideas in biology - cell theory and evolution.
And if you put both together, there can only be one conclusion - that all life on Earth began with one single cell.
Darwin himself never connected the two theories in such a direct way.
But what he did do, just 11 years after publishing The Origin Of Species, was make an unholy attempt to explain how life may have begun.
He expressed this thought in a private letter to his botanist friend, Joseph Hooker.
And this time, there was no mention of the Creator.
And this is it, it's incredible, I've studied Darwin for many years and this is the first time I've seen one of his letters, penned by his own hand.
And I've got to tell you that his handwriting is appalling.
But just listen to what he says.
"If we could conceive of some warm little pond, with all sorts "of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, etcetera, "present that protein compound was chemically formed ready to undergo "still more complex changes.
" So Darwin had done a complete U-turn.
No sign of the Creator.
He was now suggesting that life on Earth began with chemistry.
No wonder he stopped going to church! Darwin had seeded an important thought.
He'd suggested that with the right cocktail of ingredients, the chemicals of life could have emerged spontaneously.
But how on earth - and where on Earth - that could have happened, was a mystery.
The answer wouldn't be proposed until the 1920s, by a rather unlikely duo.
One half was Russian bio-chemist, Alexander Oparin.
The second was the renowned British scientist, John Haldane.
Although the men had never met, they both came up with almost identical theories about the conditions in which the first cells came to life.
There would have been very little oxygen in the atmosphere.
Instead, a mixture of other gases - hydrogen, methane and ammonia.
These would have combined with the water of the oceans to form a chemical brew which Haldane christened the pre-biotic soup.
This soup would have been exposed to the scorching ultra-violet rays from the sun, which kick-started all manner of chemical reactions within it.
Simple compounds reacted together, evolving into more complex molecules.
Eventually, they formed a system that could feed, reproduce, and evolve.
The first cells.
This picture of the early origins of life became known as The Oparin - Haldane Hypothesis.
In its day, the idea that life could emerge in such a hostile, toxic environment seemed kind of daft.
But nowadays, it's not quite so ridiculous.
Here at Mono Lake in California the conditions are not dissimilar to how we imagine they might have been on the early Earth.
There's almost no oxygen in the water, and it's warm and bubbling with sulphorous gases.
If you taste it .
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it's absolutely revolting.
More than three times the salt that we find in the sea and it's highly alkali, like window cleaner.
And yet, life still abounds here.
In this sample are millions of single-celled organisms that flourish in these extreme conditions.
Yet even without this knowledge, Oparin and Haldane had taken Darwin's notion of a warm little pond and developed it into a scientific theory.
One that proposed the chemical ingredients that may have led to the first cells.
What was missing was the experimental evidence to back their case.
That would come almost 30 years later from a most unlikely source.
America, 1952.
The University Of Chicago.
The can-do post-war optimism had rubbed off on a 22 year-old graduate student in the chemistry department.
His name was Stanley Miller, and for one so young, he was about to do something remarkable.
Miller was intrigued by Oparin and Haldane's theory so he designed an experiment to test it in the lab.
His plan was to have a stab at reproducing the conditions of the early Earth, to see if anything related to life would form.
It sounded so far-fetched that Miller's professor gave him just six months to produce a result, rather shorter than the millions of years the Earth had taken.
This is the actual kit that Stanley Miller built.
This lower sphere filled with boiling water and that represents the early oceans of the Earth.
When Miller did the experiment, this top sphere was filled with gases that represented the atmosphere of the primordial Earth - that's methane, ammonia and hydrogen.
And these two probes introducing an electric spark which simulated the violent lightning-rich atmosphere of the early Earth, like this.
Now I can't do this experiment for real, because it's actually highly dangerous.
Unless you flush out all the air in the system, the whole kit might explode.
Plus, this electrical grid is live at 10,000 volts, so I really mustn't touch it.
Just two days into his experiment, Miller noticed that the water had turned pale yellow.
After just a week, the flask was coated in an oily brown scum.
Something weird was definitely happening in his primordial soup, but what was it? Using a technique called paper chromatography, Miller analysed the contents of the flask.
And this is a copy of the actual results.
It may not look like much, but to Miller, it was absolutely sensational.
Because each of these blobs is the chemical signature of a molecule called an amino acid.
And amino acids are essential molecules to all life.
No wonder Miller got so excited.
Amino acids are the building blocks that join up to form larger, complex molecules called proteins, the worker molecules inside all cells.
Some proteins you may have heard of.
The haemoglobin found inside our blood cells is a protein.
Its job is to pick up oxygen molecules and carry them round our body.
Antibodies are proteins.
They're dispatched by our immune cells to attack foreign invaders.
And hair and nails get their structure from keratin.
That's a protein, too.
There are literally thousands of weird and wonderful types of protein, frantically busy carrying out all the activities that make cells alive.
And all of these different proteins can be made by combining just 20 different amino acids.
So when Stanley Miller found five amino acids in his primordial soup, it was pretty shocking stuff.
He'd shown experimentally how some of the crucial ingredients of the cell, could have formed on the early Earth.
When the results were published in 1953, Stanley Miller instantly became a celebrity, with some newspapers rather extravagantly reporting he had created life in the lab.
All very Frankenstein, but many believedwe were close to achieving what was thought to be impossible - understanding the origin of life.
After the success of his early experiments, Miller continued his research here at the University of California on San Diego's Pacific Beach.
And though he died in 2007, his work is still yielding surprises.
Hi, Jeffrey.
Hello.
Nice to meet you.
Adam.
Yeah, nice to see you.
'Professor Jeffrey Bada, who was taught by Miller, 'has stumbled across evidence that the original experiments 'were even more successful than Miller realised.
' So, Jeffrey, I understand you've made a pretty amazing discovery in the last couple of years? Right, it turns out that I inherited everything in Stanley's laboratory and we went in and we found an old cardboard box and inside it 'Jeffrey's discovered the sealed vials containing residues from 'Miller's original experiments nearly 60 years ago.
' This is actually them.
This is actually them, this is Stanley's writing.
That's so cool.
He used methane ammonia, hydrogen, water and a spark.
I love it, "And a spark.
" Nothing more precise! And look at these and you see that each one of these little vials has a tiny amount of residue in there.
That's a real piece of history.
It really is.
We were just dumbstruck that we had these.
This is the classic experiment, but what I was intrigued by was this little box here.
This box came from a different experiment 'These vials are from a variation on Miller's original experiment.
'And its focus was volcanoes.
'This time Miller had modified his equipment to simulate 'the effect of hot volcanic gases on early Earth.
'He never fully published the results.
'But with today's technology, 'Professor Bada been able re-examine these historic residues.
' In where? In this tiny little hole here?Yes.
You need steady hands to do this.
'This is quite an honour.
'I'm injecting one of the original samples into this analysis machine.
'This is the part of his research Miller never got to see.
' OK, there's the results.
You can seeThat's amazing! Each one of these peaks here are a different amino acid.
This very large peak here is one that he could not identify.
It's alpha-Aminobutyric acid.
You can see it's huge.
Every single one of these spikes on the graph represents an amino acid that you found in one of the old samples.
We've got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight here.
How many have you found in all of your analysis? Over 20, close to 25.
Actually there's more there, we just stopped at 25.
There's probably another 30 or 40 in there.
Very low amounts.
He found five, and you rediscovered the samples 50 years later and you found five times more.
At least five times more.
So you knew Stanley Miller, what do you think he would have thought of this new analysis? He would have been thrilled to realise that his experiment was far more successful than he imagined.
What Stanley Miller's experiment did was demonstrate how many of the amino acids vital to all living things could have been present in the Earth's primordial soup.
Although Miller's discovery was a staggering revelation, it was still a long way from actually creating life.
To make even a single protein molecule, like the ones you find in living cells, you have to string together a whole chain of amino acids in a very specific order.
So how do cells do it? In Britain, James Watson and Francis Crick were about to make a huge discovery.
One that would provide the key to how cells assemble amino acids to make proteins.
DNA.
It stands for Deoxyribonucleic Acid.
This is the stuff of life.
In 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick famously discovered its double-helix structure.
That's just one year after Stanley Miller's experiment.
It has an exquisite architecture.
All along the inside of the two strands are four molecules thatwe call bases and they pair up.
These are the chemical letters that form the genetic code - A, T, C and G.
And this gives DNA the ability to carry information.
Nothing like this had ever been found in nature before.
But Watson and Crick's discovery didn't yet explain how the information stored in DNA's chemical letters translated into life.
This would come from Crick alone.
In 1958, he published a theory that would end up underpinning all of biology.
It also explained how cells can do what Stanley Miller's experiment hadn't - join up amino acids to make proteins.
To understand it, let me take you inside a cell's nucleus.
Crick proposed that the information inside DNA was in fact a precise set of instructions, instructions which specify the exact order to join up amino acids to make the proteins in our cells.
The way the cell carries out these instructions is spectacular.
Each time the cell needs to make a particular protein, the instructions are copied from part of the DNA strand to a new molecule called RNA.
The RNA carries the instructions for building the protein out of the cell nucleus, heading for this structure, called a ribosome.
This is basically the cell's protein factory.
As the ribosome works its way along the RNA strand, it reads the instructions, and these tell it which amino acids to join together and in which order to make the specific protein.
There it is - a protein.
And just think, the cell builds proteins thousands of times a minute to stay alive.
It may sound pretty complex and elaborate, but this very same process, DNA makes RNA makes protein, is at the heart of every living cell on Earth, from bacteria to insects, from plankton to people.
It's so quintessential to life that it has become known as the Central Dogma.
And the discovery of this process at the heart of all life opened up vast new possibilities.
By the 1970s, geneticists could isolate individual genes - that's specific stretches of DNA - to find out what proteins they made.
And it wasn't long before scientists spotted the massive potential of this new knowledge.
Now they could attempt to change the inner workings of the cell, to take control of life itself.
At the cutting edge was a young scientist, Herbert Boyer, soon to be the first bio-tech millionaire.
Working with a team in California, Boyer was the first to take a gene from a human cell and insert it into the DNA of bacterial cell.
This technique is known as gene splicing.
And it's opened up a whole new chapter in our quest to harness the power of the cell, as this experiment will demonstrate.
I'm taking a gene from a jellyfish, the one that makes it glow green in nature.
And I'm splicing it into the DNA of some yeast cells.
Now in this tube, I've got the jellyfish DNA and in this tube, I've got yeast cells, suspended in a solution.
I'm simply going to add the DNA to the yeast cells.
Using some clever bio-chemistry pioneered by Boyer, I'm inserting the jellyfish DNA into the DNA of yeast cells.
I'm gonna give that a little mix-up.
If it works, when the yeast cells are grown overnight on a plate of sugary jelly, they'll divide and pass on the genetic alteration to millions of offspring.
These cells are called transgenic - they contain the DNA of more than one species.
And when you look at them under a microscope, you can see how gene splicing gave us the power to control cells.
Now, the yeast cells have been growing for 24 hours now.
There should be millions of them.
I've put them on a slide and under this rather fancy microscope, we should see something pretty awesome.
And not something yeast cells have ever done in nature.
And there they are.
So every single yeast cell is now glowing bright green.
The jellyfish gene is now working inside the yeast cells and they're producing green fluorescent protein, which is normally only found in nature in the jellyfish.
You have to admit, that is pretty damn cool.
What Herbert Boyer did was use this technique to insert the human gene that makes the protein insulin into bacteria.
Remarkably, the bacteria started to produce human insulin in large amounts.
Insulin that could be used to treat people with diabetes.
Boyer's company, Genentech, launched a new industry - bio-technology.
An industry based on the astonishing fact that DNA is interchangeable between all cells.
Boyer and his colleagues had given us a vital tool to begin to control the cell.
And it's given us a profound insight into our past.
If DNA is at the heart of every cell, and every cell can read the DNA of every other cell, then there can only be one conclusion - we are all, fundamentally, made of the same stuff.
And this is the smoking gun, the indisputable evidence that Charles Darwin's predictions were bang on.
All life must have originated from a single common ancestral cell.
For the scientists trying to discover how the chemistry on early Earth gave rise to that cell, DNA presented them with a new problem.
So how did something as complex as DNA come into existence in the first place? Well, to answer that, some people turned to God, believing that DNA is so exquisite that it shows the hand of some kind of intelligent design.
Others turned to the stars.
And here at Imperial College in London, a surprising discovery has provided a clue to the origins of DNA.
At the end of this corridor, pioneers in a field called Astrobiology have spent years analysing rocks older that planet Earth itself.
These are meteorites, some of which are more than 4.
6 billion years old.
One of the lead astrobiologists is Dr Zita Martins.
She looks for evidence of life beyond the confines of Earth by searching for particular molecules buried inside rocks from outer space.
Hi, Zita.
How you doing? So what is it about meteorites that's interesting that can tell us about the origin of life? We know that specific samples of meteorites, like the ones that I have here they're about 4.
6 billion years old.
As old as the formation of our early solar system.
This is 4.
6 billion years old?! It's just It's amazing! It's exciting to hold the samples in your hands.
And that hasn't changed in close to five billion years?No.
When you first start looking at this, it looks like a rock, but you are finding stuff in here? We're finding organic molecules, extra-terrestrial organic molecules that may have been important for the origin of life on our planet.
That's why it's so exciting.
So up in space, which we think of as a big vacuum, actually there's masses of chemistry just going on actually creating the building blocks for cells? Exactly.
We think of space as an empty place, but it's not.
It's bubbling with chemical reactions.
Right, with activity.
Exactly.
In 2003, Zita got hold of one particular sample whose molecules would reveal something spectacular.
It was from a meteorite that had fallen to Earth in 1969, near the Australian town of Murchison.
It was dated to be nearly as old as our solar system.
Thanks to new technology, Zita's now able to analyse the molecules inside the rock.
And she's going show me why this particular meteorite 'has made such an impact.
' Now, this is precious stuff.
It is precious.
Usually, we only have access to milligrams of meteorite sample.
So you have to be really careful and not mess up what you're doing! I feel a sneeze coming on.
I'm going to run away.
It's essential that I don't accidentally ruin the evidence.
The meteorite is sealed inside a glass tube to prevent contamination from DNA and other molecules on Earth.
Once dissolved in solution, the sample can then be analysed by a machine capable of detecting the molecules that make up the genetic code.
OK, Zita, you've analysed the meteorite sample using this pretty awesome machine.
Show me what you find.
So what you find is something like this.
This represents one of the bases of our genetic code.
So this is a sort of signature for one of the letters that makes up the genetic code for all life? Exactly.
And this comes out of a 4.
5 billion year-old meteorite? Exactly.
This is present in the Murchison meteorite.
It must have mind-blowing to see that for the first time.
Exactly, it was a very exciting and amazing moment, actually.
Conceptually, that's just out of this world, literally, out of this world.
It is out of this world! What you're talking about is something that's absolutely inherent to life to every single cell on Earth, and it existed before the Earth even existed.
We've finally proven that components of our genetic code were in fact extra-terrestrial and were present in the meteorite sample.
The young Earth was bombarded by meteorites for millions of years.
So this is definitely a plausible explanation of how the molecules that make up DNA and RNA may have appeared on Earth.
Combined with Stanley Miller's experiments, we now have some of the essential molecules of life present on the early planet - the amino acids to build proteins, and molecules of the genetic code.
So the big question is, how did all these separate molecules come together, inside a kind of bag or membrane, so they could make the leap to become living cells? If we could do all this in the lab, we would discover the secret of what makes cells alive.
It would be the second genesis.
And if I had to place a bet on who was going to get there first, I'd put my money here - Harvard University.
They've even got a special department - the Origin Of Life Initiative.
And their starting point is something fundamental to all cells - the membrane.
That's the bag, or boundary, that contains all those clever chemicals like DNA and proteins.
Without the membrane to hold themall together, life would never have begun in the first place.
Hi, Jack.
'The lead scientist is Professor Jack Szostak.
'He believes he can show how the first cell membranes 'could have formed four billion years ago.
' How much of this field isguess work? It feels like a lot of it is intelligent guess work, but you don't have a lot of evidence to go on.
Well, we can't go back and see what happened, right? So we just have to come up with ideas that kind of make sense, that are reasonable, because at the moment, we don't have any step-by-step way of going from really simple starting materials, up to cells.
So we're just trying to fill in the gaps with reasonable ideas.
Cells construct their own membranes, each time they divide.
But how could the first cell membrane form without the machinery of a cell to make it? Jack's homed in on a molecule called a fatty acid, a simpler form of the molecules that make up today's cell membranes.
There's evidence that these fatty acids could have been around on the early Earth.
But could they have formed the first cell membranes? Jack's talking me through what he's discovered.
So, we have some dried down fatty acids in here.
So, you can un-click that.
'Inside this flask is a sample of fatty acid molecules 'stained with a red dye.
'If you add liquid to them to represent the water on early Earth, 'the fatty acids do something unexpected.
' So I'm going to put the lid on and shake it up.
Give it a good shake.
OK, is it looking cloudy? Yeah, yeah, it is, it's gone cloudy.
'Now, when the sample goes cloudy, it might not look 'that revealing to the naked eye.
'You need to look at it through a microscope.
'It's only then that you can step back four billion years.
' Wow, look at that! So,they've just self-assembled into They just self-assemble.
'Natural forces of attraction have caused the fatty acid molecules 'to group together spontaneously 'to form simple membrane-like structures.
'Jack calls them protocells.
' So, it looks like a cell.
It's what we think a primitive cell membrane would be like.
'And Jack's protocells didn't just look like living cells, 'they kind of behaved like them too.
'They could do something that resembled primitive feeding.
'Watch what happens after we've added extra fatty acids.
'This single protocell absorbs the extra molecules, 'stretching out to form one long string-like bag.
'But it's still one membrane.
' Oh, no, look at that! 'And it's at this point that Jack and his team had an idea.
' OK, so give them a few puffs of air.
From here? Like that?Yeah.
'To simulate the effects of wind and waves on the primordial Earth, 'they tried blasting the elongated protocells 'with a jet of compressed air.
Direct it towards the slide.
There! 'And when you do this, Jack's protocells 'show one of the most fundamental characteristics of life.
' A little bit of division at the end.
Oh, yeah!It's breaking up, it's breaking up.
'With a little help 'they divide.
' That's amazing.
So it's gone into one, two, three, four, five, six different smaller.
.
There's still part of the filament left.
If you don't know what you are looking at, it kind of looks bizarre, and there's not much there, but if you do, it's actually quite stunning.
It's very much like cell division, a very simple form of cell division.
I'm deeply impressed.
'But these protocells are not alive.
'They lack many of the vital characteristics of life.
'They have no DNA,and without it, 'they're not able to take on new functions and evolve.
'Making that happen is Jack's next goal.
'If he succeeds, he will have done in the lab what nature did 'four billion years ago - create life from lifeless chemicals.
'And we'll be closer to understanding 'how our single most distant ancestor, 'the first primordial cell, may have formed.
'But there's an even more ambitious goal for science.
'Not just creating primitive cells, but building cells more like 'the ones that make up our world today, 'cells with highly sophisticated inner machinery.
' Billions of years of evolution ave turned them into extraordinary, living nanomachines, far more complex than anything humans have ever designed.
'To build this type of cell, scientists are taking on a radical 'way of thinking - approaching the cell like an engineering project.
'This is where biology meets engineering, 'and a new branch of science has been invented.
' It's called synthetic biology.
If you haven't heard of it yet, trust me, you soon will.
Synbio, as it's known, is beginning to use the cell's components as a kind of tool box to radically re-engineer existing cells.
Its holy grail is to find a way to build new, man-made cells.
It'll be the first time that a new life form has been created from scratch.
These will be cells with bespoke components, programmed by us to do our bidding, anything from cleaning our teeth to seeking out and destroying cancer.
Once again, it's here at Harvard that one man has taken the first steps.
'His name is George Church, Professor of Genetics at Harvard.
'He's also adviser to more than a dozen bio-tech companies.
'This guy is one seriously smart cookie.
' Keeping you busy, aren't we? We're always busy, George! 'By the age of nine, Church had built his first computer.
'Decades later, ever the technical whizz, 'he's using computers and genetics to analyse some of the thousands 'of components of living cells and discover exactly what they do.
'He's identified 151 essential components, 'which he believes are the minimum you need to create a living cell.
'In essence, what Church and his team think they've done 'is designed a blueprint for life itself.
' Well, George, we've been on a long trip to get to this point, but this is definitely the most complicated diagram I've seen.
I don't even know where to start! What are we looking at here? Thousands of scientists over decades, have, by taking apart the cell into its pieces, and showing how each one works, sort of a reductionist approach, have accumulated this information.
But all we're doing is we're now reversing that process and taking all that knowledge and turning it into something where we can make a factory that's based on all that prior knowledge.
It's nice to get it on one page where you can actually see the shape of these things the same way that you would a motor.
It's taking things apart and you put them back together.
Do you think of them in terms of car parts? We do.
We're trying to make practical systems that help society, and since we now know what their structures look like and we know which ones we need to do which tasks, it's very appealing to think of it as, we can engineer each part and we can engineer the whole system.
If they don't have the properties you want, you can redesign it and you can evolve it in the lab, and you can make them better for your purposes.
Hang on a second - just listen again to what George said.
We can engineer each part and we can engineer the whole system.
If they don't have the properties you want, you can redesign it, and you can evolve it in the lab, and you can make them better for your purposes.
'When George says, "Engineer the whole system," 'that's his geek-speak for, "Build a new life form in the lab.
" 'I'm in awe.
'But to build this synthetic cell in the lab, 'there's one essential component George knew he'd have to crack '.
.
the ribosome, the cell's protein factory.
'The bit that reads the instructions written in the DNA code, 'and actually builds the protein molecules that makes cells alive.
'It's nature's most exquisite nanomachine.
' More and more indication this is the key component of life.
It's one of the most ancient components, it's one of the most conserved, meaning it's one of the only things that's present in all types of living things, and so you just keep coming back to this.
This is the key part.
'Put simply, no ribosome, no life.
'So it'll be a crucial component of any synthetic cell.
'Trouble is, it's a staggering feat of natural engineering.
'It has 57 parts that rotate, grab and shift, 'together made of almost a million atoms.
'So how could you possibly make one in a lab?' You can't build a ribosome like a model aeroplane.
We're talking about a molecule so small that you could fit tens of thousands of them on the tip of a sharpened pencil.
Tweezers don't come that small.
So we have to return to the way that nature does it, and our old friend, DNA.
'Of course, DNA contains the instructions 'to build the ribosomes within cells.
'So George has used DNA to do it for him in the lab.
'Today, I'm going to build a ribosome myself.
Brace yourselves! 'First you need the strand of DNA with the right instructions.
'This clever machine here can make it synthetically.
'I simply have to enter the right letters of the genetic code 'and it assembles the DNA, molecule by molecule.
'Magic.
'That's the easy bit.
Now we have to put together 'the exact mixture of molecules the DNA needs to make a ribosome.
'To create this has taken decades of work by George 'and thousands of other scientists.
' This is the DNA that we've synthesised.
How do we do it? Just pick up the pipette and add the predetermined volume.
As simple as that? 'All I have to do, with a little supervision from George, 'is the last stage in this remarkable process - 'add the DNA to George's ribosome mixture.
'I'm now just one step away from creating a synthetic ribosome, 'one that hasn't been created by a cell.
'This lab is the only place this has been achieved 'during the entire history of life on Earth.
'And it's certainly never been filmed before.
' All right, so that's 1.
25 microlitres of ribosome DNA, and that's going into this mix which contains everything else to make a ribosome.
Right? That's right.
So, basically, I'm taking the instructions to finish making the ribosome and adding them to the rest of the mix.
Synthetic DNA will make the ribosome.
OK.
That's it.
It's done.
So it doesn't look like much, it looks like about 15 microlitres of colourless liquid.
But what actually is in here is all the ingredients to make a synthetic ribosome, the piece of machinery that's going to translate the code of DNA into actual working proteins.
All I have to do now is put it in the incubator and cook it for half an hour.
'30 minutes later, 'George seems pretty confident we've built fully functioning ribosomes.
'But I want to see for myself.
'I want to see if they're actually working.
'Can our man-made ribosomes make proteins 'like their counterparts in nature? 'George has got an ingenious way to show that they can.
'He's given our synthetic ribsomes a stretch of firefly DNA.
'Normally, this bit of DNA tells the ribosomes inside 'the firefly cells to make a protein that glows in the dark.
'If my man-made ribosomes are working, 'then it should also read the firefly DNA 'and make the same protein.
'In short, my colourless liquid should start to glow green.
' Switch off the lights, please.
OK.
No way! That's amazing! My goodness, that's just shocking.
This is groundbreaking stuff! This is a synthetic ribosome, in action, doing its job.
Right.
That, that's off the hook! 'For me, as a scientist, this is just awesome.
' So this is one of the key steps to making a synthetic cell.
You've produced a working synthetic ribosome which actually translates the DNA code into a working protein, just like it does in a real cell.
How long is it going to be before you make the rest of the components to make a living cell? Probably about a year.
A year?! A year from going from this tube which is glowing, to making effectively what is a synthetic life form?Right.
It's only about 100 extra components.
We can make those all at once.
You must be pretty excited.
You're on the threshold of something enormous.
How does that make you feel? Well, it hasn't happened yet.
It'll make me feel very happy once it happens! We've just built one of the most complicated and vital components of all living cells.
Something that has been present in nature for billions of years, and we've done it in an afternoon.
If George Church is right, that he'll soon be able to build an entire man-made cell, then we will have reached one of the most important moments in history - the second genesis.
This is where four centuries of extraordinary scientific achievement has brought us.
From the time when scientists first peered through their blurry lenses and puzzled at the mysteries of cells .
to a moment when we can turn our knowledge of their innermost secrets to benefit humanity.
This is a future that no doubt will present challenges.
But it's a future I believe we should embrace.
This ability to create living cells is kick-starting the next scientific revolution.
It'll affect every aspect of our lives, from fuel to food to medicine.
It'll even question our definition of what life is.
The implications and the benefits for humankind are simply breathtaking.
Evidence trapped inside rocks from our planet's ancient past.
A time long before the dinosaurs.
Even before the first creatures appeared in the oceans, over 500 million years ago.
They are fossilised cells.
These cells are a staggering one billion years old.
It's now believed that all life on Earth emerged from one single primordial cell, perhaps not dissimilar to one of these.
Ever since, the spark of life has passed from cell to cell in a perfect, unbroken chain .
.
with life adapting and evolving into the millions of species on our planet today.
Every single one of them can trace its origins back to that first cell.
But now, we are on the brink of something truly profound.
We may be about to create living cells from scratch.
If we succeed, it will be the first life-form on Earth that hasn't evolved from that original cell.
It will be the second genesis.
In all the billions of years that this planet has existed, only once did a cell survive to evolve into every living thing we have today.
That's quite a thought.
All life on Earth came from just one cell.
So how are scientists going to create life in a lab .
.
when nature only ever achieved this once? I've come to San Francisco to show you why the cell could become the most powerful tool on the planet.
Building cells in the lab sounds like science fiction, but scientists can already alter the cells that nature has made.
They can take cells that have evolved over billions of years and manipulate them in unbelievable ways.
Dr Stephen del Cardayre leads a team of scientists who have started with a bacterial cell and re-engineered its inner workings.
We've basically remodelled the cell.
We've taken a naturally occurring bacteria, E.
coli, and souped it up.
We are taking this microbe, the chassis of this organism.
It is analogous to building a monster truck.
We start with a small truck, this bacteria, and we pull off the original wheels and put in some big wheels.
Steve and his team have added new genetic components to the bacteria's ancient DNA.
'When they take this cell, with its modified DNA, and feed it sugar, 'the result is awesome.
' I just want to get to it! I want to see them!I wanna find a good place on the slide.
Stop there.
'This round thing is a blob of pure diesel oil.
' So these things here are the bacteria? You can see the rod shapes.
Yeah, there's one.
They're in the midst of, have just finished, converting renewable sugar to secreted, ultra-clean diesel.
It's an oil product.
'Feed sugar to these modified bacteria cells 'and they give you diesel oil.
' That big blob is simply oil? That's our ultra-clean diesel product, a finished product fuel.
We have to separate it, wash it a little bit and it's ready to go.
You're really blase about this, but that is completely nuts! You have got microbes producing diesel.
We're really excited about it! We've been working really hard on this.
The microbes have been working harder! This is revolutionary stuff.
Steve and his team have set up a test refinery where these manipulated bacteria are now producing just not just a few drops of oil, but gallons of it.
And this is what you end up with, in this case, pure diesel.
Just in case you think this is a hoax, watch this.
Look at that! Diesel power! Sensational! Just a couple of days ago that was just bacteria.
Now, it's running a diesel generator! That's the power of the cell.
Diesel power! What's happening here is a glimpse of what cells could do for us in the future.
As living machines, they have enormous powers.
Up to now, we have only been able to manipulate naturally-occurring cells.
But how much further could we go if we could actually create life, if we could build new cells from scratch? To do that, we'd have to solve a fundamental mystery - what gives a cell its spark of life? What turns lifeless chemicals into a living thing? The obvious starting point is to try to understand how life on Earth began in the first place.
So I'm beginning with a man who in 1859 published a theory that addressed the question of how life evolved .
.
Charles Darwin.
These are Darwin's books that he owned.
'I've been given unprecedented access to his private library.
' This is an important book.
Am I allowed to touch these? I feel like I can't touch these things.
This is The Origin Of Species, the book in which Charles Darwin outlines the theory of evolution by natural selection.
But this copy is unique and totally priceless.
This is the first copy of the first edition, the one that the publisher sent to Darwin himself, hot off the press.
On page 484, there's a remarkable passage which gives an insight into what Darwin himself thought about the origins of life.
"All the organic beings which have ever lived on this Earth " have descended from some one primordial form "into which life was first breathed.
" This doesn't simply say that we humans have evolved from an ape-like ancestor.
It goes much further than that.
It suggested that all living things, from insects to elephants, from a hyacinth to a human, have evolved from one single common ancestor.
It flew in the face of the Bible's account of creation.
At the time, Darwin didn't propose a scientific explanation for what created this original life-form.
His notion that life was breathed into the primordial common ancestor left room for the Creator.
Yet Darwin's Origin Of Species introduced one of the most important thoughts in science - that all life on Earth sprung from one single organism.
But to know what that organism would have been, you have to turn to the other big idea around in Darwin's day.
It was the theory that cells form the basis of all living things.
When it was first proposed in the 1830s, this was a shocking revelation.
From Man, to flowers, to frogs, it showed we're all made up of the same building blocks.
By the time Darwin published his work on evolution, cell theory was the new bedrock of biology.
And crucially, scientists had shown that new cells are born only when existing cells divide.
All living cells are descended from other cells.
So, in just two decades in the 19th century, scientists had come up with the two biggest ideas in biology - cell theory and evolution.
And if you put both together, there can only be one conclusion - that all life on Earth began with one single cell.
Darwin himself never connected the two theories in such a direct way.
But what he did do, just 11 years after publishing The Origin Of Species, was make an unholy attempt to explain how life may have begun.
He expressed this thought in a private letter to his botanist friend, Joseph Hooker.
And this time, there was no mention of the Creator.
And this is it, it's incredible, I've studied Darwin for many years and this is the first time I've seen one of his letters, penned by his own hand.
And I've got to tell you that his handwriting is appalling.
But just listen to what he says.
"If we could conceive of some warm little pond, with all sorts "of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, etcetera, "present that protein compound was chemically formed ready to undergo "still more complex changes.
" So Darwin had done a complete U-turn.
No sign of the Creator.
He was now suggesting that life on Earth began with chemistry.
No wonder he stopped going to church! Darwin had seeded an important thought.
He'd suggested that with the right cocktail of ingredients, the chemicals of life could have emerged spontaneously.
But how on earth - and where on Earth - that could have happened, was a mystery.
The answer wouldn't be proposed until the 1920s, by a rather unlikely duo.
One half was Russian bio-chemist, Alexander Oparin.
The second was the renowned British scientist, John Haldane.
Although the men had never met, they both came up with almost identical theories about the conditions in which the first cells came to life.
There would have been very little oxygen in the atmosphere.
Instead, a mixture of other gases - hydrogen, methane and ammonia.
These would have combined with the water of the oceans to form a chemical brew which Haldane christened the pre-biotic soup.
This soup would have been exposed to the scorching ultra-violet rays from the sun, which kick-started all manner of chemical reactions within it.
Simple compounds reacted together, evolving into more complex molecules.
Eventually, they formed a system that could feed, reproduce, and evolve.
The first cells.
This picture of the early origins of life became known as The Oparin - Haldane Hypothesis.
In its day, the idea that life could emerge in such a hostile, toxic environment seemed kind of daft.
But nowadays, it's not quite so ridiculous.
Here at Mono Lake in California the conditions are not dissimilar to how we imagine they might have been on the early Earth.
There's almost no oxygen in the water, and it's warm and bubbling with sulphorous gases.
If you taste it .
.
it's absolutely revolting.
More than three times the salt that we find in the sea and it's highly alkali, like window cleaner.
And yet, life still abounds here.
In this sample are millions of single-celled organisms that flourish in these extreme conditions.
Yet even without this knowledge, Oparin and Haldane had taken Darwin's notion of a warm little pond and developed it into a scientific theory.
One that proposed the chemical ingredients that may have led to the first cells.
What was missing was the experimental evidence to back their case.
That would come almost 30 years later from a most unlikely source.
America, 1952.
The University Of Chicago.
The can-do post-war optimism had rubbed off on a 22 year-old graduate student in the chemistry department.
His name was Stanley Miller, and for one so young, he was about to do something remarkable.
Miller was intrigued by Oparin and Haldane's theory so he designed an experiment to test it in the lab.
His plan was to have a stab at reproducing the conditions of the early Earth, to see if anything related to life would form.
It sounded so far-fetched that Miller's professor gave him just six months to produce a result, rather shorter than the millions of years the Earth had taken.
This is the actual kit that Stanley Miller built.
This lower sphere filled with boiling water and that represents the early oceans of the Earth.
When Miller did the experiment, this top sphere was filled with gases that represented the atmosphere of the primordial Earth - that's methane, ammonia and hydrogen.
And these two probes introducing an electric spark which simulated the violent lightning-rich atmosphere of the early Earth, like this.
Now I can't do this experiment for real, because it's actually highly dangerous.
Unless you flush out all the air in the system, the whole kit might explode.
Plus, this electrical grid is live at 10,000 volts, so I really mustn't touch it.
Just two days into his experiment, Miller noticed that the water had turned pale yellow.
After just a week, the flask was coated in an oily brown scum.
Something weird was definitely happening in his primordial soup, but what was it? Using a technique called paper chromatography, Miller analysed the contents of the flask.
And this is a copy of the actual results.
It may not look like much, but to Miller, it was absolutely sensational.
Because each of these blobs is the chemical signature of a molecule called an amino acid.
And amino acids are essential molecules to all life.
No wonder Miller got so excited.
Amino acids are the building blocks that join up to form larger, complex molecules called proteins, the worker molecules inside all cells.
Some proteins you may have heard of.
The haemoglobin found inside our blood cells is a protein.
Its job is to pick up oxygen molecules and carry them round our body.
Antibodies are proteins.
They're dispatched by our immune cells to attack foreign invaders.
And hair and nails get their structure from keratin.
That's a protein, too.
There are literally thousands of weird and wonderful types of protein, frantically busy carrying out all the activities that make cells alive.
And all of these different proteins can be made by combining just 20 different amino acids.
So when Stanley Miller found five amino acids in his primordial soup, it was pretty shocking stuff.
He'd shown experimentally how some of the crucial ingredients of the cell, could have formed on the early Earth.
When the results were published in 1953, Stanley Miller instantly became a celebrity, with some newspapers rather extravagantly reporting he had created life in the lab.
All very Frankenstein, but many believedwe were close to achieving what was thought to be impossible - understanding the origin of life.
After the success of his early experiments, Miller continued his research here at the University of California on San Diego's Pacific Beach.
And though he died in 2007, his work is still yielding surprises.
Hi, Jeffrey.
Hello.
Nice to meet you.
Adam.
Yeah, nice to see you.
'Professor Jeffrey Bada, who was taught by Miller, 'has stumbled across evidence that the original experiments 'were even more successful than Miller realised.
' So, Jeffrey, I understand you've made a pretty amazing discovery in the last couple of years? Right, it turns out that I inherited everything in Stanley's laboratory and we went in and we found an old cardboard box and inside it 'Jeffrey's discovered the sealed vials containing residues from 'Miller's original experiments nearly 60 years ago.
' This is actually them.
This is actually them, this is Stanley's writing.
That's so cool.
He used methane ammonia, hydrogen, water and a spark.
I love it, "And a spark.
" Nothing more precise! And look at these and you see that each one of these little vials has a tiny amount of residue in there.
That's a real piece of history.
It really is.
We were just dumbstruck that we had these.
This is the classic experiment, but what I was intrigued by was this little box here.
This box came from a different experiment 'These vials are from a variation on Miller's original experiment.
'And its focus was volcanoes.
'This time Miller had modified his equipment to simulate 'the effect of hot volcanic gases on early Earth.
'He never fully published the results.
'But with today's technology, 'Professor Bada been able re-examine these historic residues.
' In where? In this tiny little hole here?Yes.
You need steady hands to do this.
'This is quite an honour.
'I'm injecting one of the original samples into this analysis machine.
'This is the part of his research Miller never got to see.
' OK, there's the results.
You can seeThat's amazing! Each one of these peaks here are a different amino acid.
This very large peak here is one that he could not identify.
It's alpha-Aminobutyric acid.
You can see it's huge.
Every single one of these spikes on the graph represents an amino acid that you found in one of the old samples.
We've got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight here.
How many have you found in all of your analysis? Over 20, close to 25.
Actually there's more there, we just stopped at 25.
There's probably another 30 or 40 in there.
Very low amounts.
He found five, and you rediscovered the samples 50 years later and you found five times more.
At least five times more.
So you knew Stanley Miller, what do you think he would have thought of this new analysis? He would have been thrilled to realise that his experiment was far more successful than he imagined.
What Stanley Miller's experiment did was demonstrate how many of the amino acids vital to all living things could have been present in the Earth's primordial soup.
Although Miller's discovery was a staggering revelation, it was still a long way from actually creating life.
To make even a single protein molecule, like the ones you find in living cells, you have to string together a whole chain of amino acids in a very specific order.
So how do cells do it? In Britain, James Watson and Francis Crick were about to make a huge discovery.
One that would provide the key to how cells assemble amino acids to make proteins.
DNA.
It stands for Deoxyribonucleic Acid.
This is the stuff of life.
In 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick famously discovered its double-helix structure.
That's just one year after Stanley Miller's experiment.
It has an exquisite architecture.
All along the inside of the two strands are four molecules thatwe call bases and they pair up.
These are the chemical letters that form the genetic code - A, T, C and G.
And this gives DNA the ability to carry information.
Nothing like this had ever been found in nature before.
But Watson and Crick's discovery didn't yet explain how the information stored in DNA's chemical letters translated into life.
This would come from Crick alone.
In 1958, he published a theory that would end up underpinning all of biology.
It also explained how cells can do what Stanley Miller's experiment hadn't - join up amino acids to make proteins.
To understand it, let me take you inside a cell's nucleus.
Crick proposed that the information inside DNA was in fact a precise set of instructions, instructions which specify the exact order to join up amino acids to make the proteins in our cells.
The way the cell carries out these instructions is spectacular.
Each time the cell needs to make a particular protein, the instructions are copied from part of the DNA strand to a new molecule called RNA.
The RNA carries the instructions for building the protein out of the cell nucleus, heading for this structure, called a ribosome.
This is basically the cell's protein factory.
As the ribosome works its way along the RNA strand, it reads the instructions, and these tell it which amino acids to join together and in which order to make the specific protein.
There it is - a protein.
And just think, the cell builds proteins thousands of times a minute to stay alive.
It may sound pretty complex and elaborate, but this very same process, DNA makes RNA makes protein, is at the heart of every living cell on Earth, from bacteria to insects, from plankton to people.
It's so quintessential to life that it has become known as the Central Dogma.
And the discovery of this process at the heart of all life opened up vast new possibilities.
By the 1970s, geneticists could isolate individual genes - that's specific stretches of DNA - to find out what proteins they made.
And it wasn't long before scientists spotted the massive potential of this new knowledge.
Now they could attempt to change the inner workings of the cell, to take control of life itself.
At the cutting edge was a young scientist, Herbert Boyer, soon to be the first bio-tech millionaire.
Working with a team in California, Boyer was the first to take a gene from a human cell and insert it into the DNA of bacterial cell.
This technique is known as gene splicing.
And it's opened up a whole new chapter in our quest to harness the power of the cell, as this experiment will demonstrate.
I'm taking a gene from a jellyfish, the one that makes it glow green in nature.
And I'm splicing it into the DNA of some yeast cells.
Now in this tube, I've got the jellyfish DNA and in this tube, I've got yeast cells, suspended in a solution.
I'm simply going to add the DNA to the yeast cells.
Using some clever bio-chemistry pioneered by Boyer, I'm inserting the jellyfish DNA into the DNA of yeast cells.
I'm gonna give that a little mix-up.
If it works, when the yeast cells are grown overnight on a plate of sugary jelly, they'll divide and pass on the genetic alteration to millions of offspring.
These cells are called transgenic - they contain the DNA of more than one species.
And when you look at them under a microscope, you can see how gene splicing gave us the power to control cells.
Now, the yeast cells have been growing for 24 hours now.
There should be millions of them.
I've put them on a slide and under this rather fancy microscope, we should see something pretty awesome.
And not something yeast cells have ever done in nature.
And there they are.
So every single yeast cell is now glowing bright green.
The jellyfish gene is now working inside the yeast cells and they're producing green fluorescent protein, which is normally only found in nature in the jellyfish.
You have to admit, that is pretty damn cool.
What Herbert Boyer did was use this technique to insert the human gene that makes the protein insulin into bacteria.
Remarkably, the bacteria started to produce human insulin in large amounts.
Insulin that could be used to treat people with diabetes.
Boyer's company, Genentech, launched a new industry - bio-technology.
An industry based on the astonishing fact that DNA is interchangeable between all cells.
Boyer and his colleagues had given us a vital tool to begin to control the cell.
And it's given us a profound insight into our past.
If DNA is at the heart of every cell, and every cell can read the DNA of every other cell, then there can only be one conclusion - we are all, fundamentally, made of the same stuff.
And this is the smoking gun, the indisputable evidence that Charles Darwin's predictions were bang on.
All life must have originated from a single common ancestral cell.
For the scientists trying to discover how the chemistry on early Earth gave rise to that cell, DNA presented them with a new problem.
So how did something as complex as DNA come into existence in the first place? Well, to answer that, some people turned to God, believing that DNA is so exquisite that it shows the hand of some kind of intelligent design.
Others turned to the stars.
And here at Imperial College in London, a surprising discovery has provided a clue to the origins of DNA.
At the end of this corridor, pioneers in a field called Astrobiology have spent years analysing rocks older that planet Earth itself.
These are meteorites, some of which are more than 4.
6 billion years old.
One of the lead astrobiologists is Dr Zita Martins.
She looks for evidence of life beyond the confines of Earth by searching for particular molecules buried inside rocks from outer space.
Hi, Zita.
How you doing? So what is it about meteorites that's interesting that can tell us about the origin of life? We know that specific samples of meteorites, like the ones that I have here they're about 4.
6 billion years old.
As old as the formation of our early solar system.
This is 4.
6 billion years old?! It's just It's amazing! It's exciting to hold the samples in your hands.
And that hasn't changed in close to five billion years?No.
When you first start looking at this, it looks like a rock, but you are finding stuff in here? We're finding organic molecules, extra-terrestrial organic molecules that may have been important for the origin of life on our planet.
That's why it's so exciting.
So up in space, which we think of as a big vacuum, actually there's masses of chemistry just going on actually creating the building blocks for cells? Exactly.
We think of space as an empty place, but it's not.
It's bubbling with chemical reactions.
Right, with activity.
Exactly.
In 2003, Zita got hold of one particular sample whose molecules would reveal something spectacular.
It was from a meteorite that had fallen to Earth in 1969, near the Australian town of Murchison.
It was dated to be nearly as old as our solar system.
Thanks to new technology, Zita's now able to analyse the molecules inside the rock.
And she's going show me why this particular meteorite 'has made such an impact.
' Now, this is precious stuff.
It is precious.
Usually, we only have access to milligrams of meteorite sample.
So you have to be really careful and not mess up what you're doing! I feel a sneeze coming on.
I'm going to run away.
It's essential that I don't accidentally ruin the evidence.
The meteorite is sealed inside a glass tube to prevent contamination from DNA and other molecules on Earth.
Once dissolved in solution, the sample can then be analysed by a machine capable of detecting the molecules that make up the genetic code.
OK, Zita, you've analysed the meteorite sample using this pretty awesome machine.
Show me what you find.
So what you find is something like this.
This represents one of the bases of our genetic code.
So this is a sort of signature for one of the letters that makes up the genetic code for all life? Exactly.
And this comes out of a 4.
5 billion year-old meteorite? Exactly.
This is present in the Murchison meteorite.
It must have mind-blowing to see that for the first time.
Exactly, it was a very exciting and amazing moment, actually.
Conceptually, that's just out of this world, literally, out of this world.
It is out of this world! What you're talking about is something that's absolutely inherent to life to every single cell on Earth, and it existed before the Earth even existed.
We've finally proven that components of our genetic code were in fact extra-terrestrial and were present in the meteorite sample.
The young Earth was bombarded by meteorites for millions of years.
So this is definitely a plausible explanation of how the molecules that make up DNA and RNA may have appeared on Earth.
Combined with Stanley Miller's experiments, we now have some of the essential molecules of life present on the early planet - the amino acids to build proteins, and molecules of the genetic code.
So the big question is, how did all these separate molecules come together, inside a kind of bag or membrane, so they could make the leap to become living cells? If we could do all this in the lab, we would discover the secret of what makes cells alive.
It would be the second genesis.
And if I had to place a bet on who was going to get there first, I'd put my money here - Harvard University.
They've even got a special department - the Origin Of Life Initiative.
And their starting point is something fundamental to all cells - the membrane.
That's the bag, or boundary, that contains all those clever chemicals like DNA and proteins.
Without the membrane to hold themall together, life would never have begun in the first place.
Hi, Jack.
'The lead scientist is Professor Jack Szostak.
'He believes he can show how the first cell membranes 'could have formed four billion years ago.
' How much of this field isguess work? It feels like a lot of it is intelligent guess work, but you don't have a lot of evidence to go on.
Well, we can't go back and see what happened, right? So we just have to come up with ideas that kind of make sense, that are reasonable, because at the moment, we don't have any step-by-step way of going from really simple starting materials, up to cells.
So we're just trying to fill in the gaps with reasonable ideas.
Cells construct their own membranes, each time they divide.
But how could the first cell membrane form without the machinery of a cell to make it? Jack's homed in on a molecule called a fatty acid, a simpler form of the molecules that make up today's cell membranes.
There's evidence that these fatty acids could have been around on the early Earth.
But could they have formed the first cell membranes? Jack's talking me through what he's discovered.
So, we have some dried down fatty acids in here.
So, you can un-click that.
'Inside this flask is a sample of fatty acid molecules 'stained with a red dye.
'If you add liquid to them to represent the water on early Earth, 'the fatty acids do something unexpected.
' So I'm going to put the lid on and shake it up.
Give it a good shake.
OK, is it looking cloudy? Yeah, yeah, it is, it's gone cloudy.
'Now, when the sample goes cloudy, it might not look 'that revealing to the naked eye.
'You need to look at it through a microscope.
'It's only then that you can step back four billion years.
' Wow, look at that! So,they've just self-assembled into They just self-assemble.
'Natural forces of attraction have caused the fatty acid molecules 'to group together spontaneously 'to form simple membrane-like structures.
'Jack calls them protocells.
' So, it looks like a cell.
It's what we think a primitive cell membrane would be like.
'And Jack's protocells didn't just look like living cells, 'they kind of behaved like them too.
'They could do something that resembled primitive feeding.
'Watch what happens after we've added extra fatty acids.
'This single protocell absorbs the extra molecules, 'stretching out to form one long string-like bag.
'But it's still one membrane.
' Oh, no, look at that! 'And it's at this point that Jack and his team had an idea.
' OK, so give them a few puffs of air.
From here? Like that?Yeah.
'To simulate the effects of wind and waves on the primordial Earth, 'they tried blasting the elongated protocells 'with a jet of compressed air.
Direct it towards the slide.
There! 'And when you do this, Jack's protocells 'show one of the most fundamental characteristics of life.
' A little bit of division at the end.
Oh, yeah!It's breaking up, it's breaking up.
'With a little help 'they divide.
' That's amazing.
So it's gone into one, two, three, four, five, six different smaller.
.
There's still part of the filament left.
If you don't know what you are looking at, it kind of looks bizarre, and there's not much there, but if you do, it's actually quite stunning.
It's very much like cell division, a very simple form of cell division.
I'm deeply impressed.
'But these protocells are not alive.
'They lack many of the vital characteristics of life.
'They have no DNA,and without it, 'they're not able to take on new functions and evolve.
'Making that happen is Jack's next goal.
'If he succeeds, he will have done in the lab what nature did 'four billion years ago - create life from lifeless chemicals.
'And we'll be closer to understanding 'how our single most distant ancestor, 'the first primordial cell, may have formed.
'But there's an even more ambitious goal for science.
'Not just creating primitive cells, but building cells more like 'the ones that make up our world today, 'cells with highly sophisticated inner machinery.
' Billions of years of evolution ave turned them into extraordinary, living nanomachines, far more complex than anything humans have ever designed.
'To build this type of cell, scientists are taking on a radical 'way of thinking - approaching the cell like an engineering project.
'This is where biology meets engineering, 'and a new branch of science has been invented.
' It's called synthetic biology.
If you haven't heard of it yet, trust me, you soon will.
Synbio, as it's known, is beginning to use the cell's components as a kind of tool box to radically re-engineer existing cells.
Its holy grail is to find a way to build new, man-made cells.
It'll be the first time that a new life form has been created from scratch.
These will be cells with bespoke components, programmed by us to do our bidding, anything from cleaning our teeth to seeking out and destroying cancer.
Once again, it's here at Harvard that one man has taken the first steps.
'His name is George Church, Professor of Genetics at Harvard.
'He's also adviser to more than a dozen bio-tech companies.
'This guy is one seriously smart cookie.
' Keeping you busy, aren't we? We're always busy, George! 'By the age of nine, Church had built his first computer.
'Decades later, ever the technical whizz, 'he's using computers and genetics to analyse some of the thousands 'of components of living cells and discover exactly what they do.
'He's identified 151 essential components, 'which he believes are the minimum you need to create a living cell.
'In essence, what Church and his team think they've done 'is designed a blueprint for life itself.
' Well, George, we've been on a long trip to get to this point, but this is definitely the most complicated diagram I've seen.
I don't even know where to start! What are we looking at here? Thousands of scientists over decades, have, by taking apart the cell into its pieces, and showing how each one works, sort of a reductionist approach, have accumulated this information.
But all we're doing is we're now reversing that process and taking all that knowledge and turning it into something where we can make a factory that's based on all that prior knowledge.
It's nice to get it on one page where you can actually see the shape of these things the same way that you would a motor.
It's taking things apart and you put them back together.
Do you think of them in terms of car parts? We do.
We're trying to make practical systems that help society, and since we now know what their structures look like and we know which ones we need to do which tasks, it's very appealing to think of it as, we can engineer each part and we can engineer the whole system.
If they don't have the properties you want, you can redesign it and you can evolve it in the lab, and you can make them better for your purposes.
Hang on a second - just listen again to what George said.
We can engineer each part and we can engineer the whole system.
If they don't have the properties you want, you can redesign it, and you can evolve it in the lab, and you can make them better for your purposes.
'When George says, "Engineer the whole system," 'that's his geek-speak for, "Build a new life form in the lab.
" 'I'm in awe.
'But to build this synthetic cell in the lab, 'there's one essential component George knew he'd have to crack '.
.
the ribosome, the cell's protein factory.
'The bit that reads the instructions written in the DNA code, 'and actually builds the protein molecules that makes cells alive.
'It's nature's most exquisite nanomachine.
' More and more indication this is the key component of life.
It's one of the most ancient components, it's one of the most conserved, meaning it's one of the only things that's present in all types of living things, and so you just keep coming back to this.
This is the key part.
'Put simply, no ribosome, no life.
'So it'll be a crucial component of any synthetic cell.
'Trouble is, it's a staggering feat of natural engineering.
'It has 57 parts that rotate, grab and shift, 'together made of almost a million atoms.
'So how could you possibly make one in a lab?' You can't build a ribosome like a model aeroplane.
We're talking about a molecule so small that you could fit tens of thousands of them on the tip of a sharpened pencil.
Tweezers don't come that small.
So we have to return to the way that nature does it, and our old friend, DNA.
'Of course, DNA contains the instructions 'to build the ribosomes within cells.
'So George has used DNA to do it for him in the lab.
'Today, I'm going to build a ribosome myself.
Brace yourselves! 'First you need the strand of DNA with the right instructions.
'This clever machine here can make it synthetically.
'I simply have to enter the right letters of the genetic code 'and it assembles the DNA, molecule by molecule.
'Magic.
'That's the easy bit.
Now we have to put together 'the exact mixture of molecules the DNA needs to make a ribosome.
'To create this has taken decades of work by George 'and thousands of other scientists.
' This is the DNA that we've synthesised.
How do we do it? Just pick up the pipette and add the predetermined volume.
As simple as that? 'All I have to do, with a little supervision from George, 'is the last stage in this remarkable process - 'add the DNA to George's ribosome mixture.
'I'm now just one step away from creating a synthetic ribosome, 'one that hasn't been created by a cell.
'This lab is the only place this has been achieved 'during the entire history of life on Earth.
'And it's certainly never been filmed before.
' All right, so that's 1.
25 microlitres of ribosome DNA, and that's going into this mix which contains everything else to make a ribosome.
Right? That's right.
So, basically, I'm taking the instructions to finish making the ribosome and adding them to the rest of the mix.
Synthetic DNA will make the ribosome.
OK.
That's it.
It's done.
So it doesn't look like much, it looks like about 15 microlitres of colourless liquid.
But what actually is in here is all the ingredients to make a synthetic ribosome, the piece of machinery that's going to translate the code of DNA into actual working proteins.
All I have to do now is put it in the incubator and cook it for half an hour.
'30 minutes later, 'George seems pretty confident we've built fully functioning ribosomes.
'But I want to see for myself.
'I want to see if they're actually working.
'Can our man-made ribosomes make proteins 'like their counterparts in nature? 'George has got an ingenious way to show that they can.
'He's given our synthetic ribsomes a stretch of firefly DNA.
'Normally, this bit of DNA tells the ribosomes inside 'the firefly cells to make a protein that glows in the dark.
'If my man-made ribosomes are working, 'then it should also read the firefly DNA 'and make the same protein.
'In short, my colourless liquid should start to glow green.
' Switch off the lights, please.
OK.
No way! That's amazing! My goodness, that's just shocking.
This is groundbreaking stuff! This is a synthetic ribosome, in action, doing its job.
Right.
That, that's off the hook! 'For me, as a scientist, this is just awesome.
' So this is one of the key steps to making a synthetic cell.
You've produced a working synthetic ribosome which actually translates the DNA code into a working protein, just like it does in a real cell.
How long is it going to be before you make the rest of the components to make a living cell? Probably about a year.
A year?! A year from going from this tube which is glowing, to making effectively what is a synthetic life form?Right.
It's only about 100 extra components.
We can make those all at once.
You must be pretty excited.
You're on the threshold of something enormous.
How does that make you feel? Well, it hasn't happened yet.
It'll make me feel very happy once it happens! We've just built one of the most complicated and vital components of all living cells.
Something that has been present in nature for billions of years, and we've done it in an afternoon.
If George Church is right, that he'll soon be able to build an entire man-made cell, then we will have reached one of the most important moments in history - the second genesis.
This is where four centuries of extraordinary scientific achievement has brought us.
From the time when scientists first peered through their blurry lenses and puzzled at the mysteries of cells .
to a moment when we can turn our knowledge of their innermost secrets to benefit humanity.
This is a future that no doubt will present challenges.
But it's a future I believe we should embrace.
This ability to create living cells is kick-starting the next scientific revolution.
It'll affect every aspect of our lives, from fuel to food to medicine.
It'll even question our definition of what life is.
The implications and the benefits for humankind are simply breathtaking.