Advanced Research on the Origin of Life

Science for the Public: Contemporary Science Issues and Innovations May 10, 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.

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**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.

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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.