The Engine That Built Life. Nick Lane - #541

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Nick Lane joins Brian Keating to argue that life is not information running on chemistry but energy in motion—showing how a single ancient metabolic “transformer” predates genes, powers mitochondria, shapes aging and cancer, constrains alien life, and reveals why today’s AI excitement echoes a solution biology discovered billions of years ago.

00:00 — Defining life vs. death; membrane potential as the boundary between living and dead
00:50 — The title “Transformer” and parallels between AI transformers and biochemical transformation
03:22 — Schrödinger’s What Is Life? and why defining life is intrinsically slippery
06:25 — Why the Krebs cycle sits at the center of metabolism
08:45 — The reverse Krebs cycle, CO₂ fixation, and links to cancer metabolism
11:35 — Mitochondrial membrane potential and the electrical field that powers life
15:00 — Reverse Krebs cycle vs. Calvin cycle and the evolution of carbon fixation
18:00 — Endosymbiosis: origin of mitochondria and chloroplasts
30:02 — Metabolism before genes; CO₂ + hydrogen and prebiotic chemistry
59:49 — Rapid-fire Q&A: RNA world critique and big open questions in origin-of-life research

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