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Ever since I was a kid I knew I wanted to do some form of science and as I grew older I knew it was going to be a tough choice between Physics and Chemistry. That’s when I found out about Chemical Physics! I read for my first degree in Chemical Physics with Industrial Experience here in Bristol and then decided to follow up my Master’s research with a PhD. Now I live and work here all the time, abusing my love and experience of the Arts to give talks and performances to do with Science in schools and in bars in the city. I try to get around on my beloved bike and cook when I can – also nothing beats watching my favorite film of all time, Bladerunner, with my colleagues!

Science is about big questions. What’s bigger than: how did life begin? Were we flown in on the back of asteroids? Were our basic components created from gases being fused together by electrical storms and highly intense sunlight. Did the right conditions exist near deep sea thermal vents, or is the notion put about by Darwin, of creatures emerging from a warm pool – the right way to think about the problem?

There’s another deeper problem that’s implicit in the question too: How do we define life? This is a big one, but from my perspective, the perspective of a scientist trying to find criteria for investigating how Life came to exist, we have these four basic points:

Compartmentalisation – an interior environment that is distinct from its exterior
Metabolism – a way of processing some sort of fuel to power itself
Replicative – an ability to produce copies of itself
Homeostatic – an ability to maintain its configuration

These four, purposefully broad, criteria allow us to investigate in a top down; removing components from modern cells until we can remove no more but they still meet these criteria, or bottom up; creating a system from scratch with simple components which self-assemble into a system which possesses these characteristics, ways of creating a minimal or protocell.

The idea behind a protocell is that such a system is most likely to have been the first step in the journey towards modern life as we see it around us today. I work using polymers, long chains of repeating molecules that interact with an oppositely charged species of molecule to create small droplets. These droplets, known as coacervates, have no membrane. But they are distinct from their environment. Compartmentalisation – tick! They have the amazing capacity to gather other molecules and objects within themselves, provided those items have the right charge or dislike water, and using this I can add molecules that can perform reactions similar to those in modern cells. Ok, so maybe I don’t have metabolism and homeostasis down just yet, but where my attention is focused is on replication. Or at the very least the ability to transfer information from a mother protocell to a daughter protocell.

I can use the fact that one of the two chemicals in my system forms another type of compartment upon addition of an acidic stimulus. I have found that material captured within my coacervate droplets is recovered in the new compartments after this stimulus – now this might not seem ground-breaking but it’s one of those tiny steps in the right direction to answering how did, all of this – come to be?

Of course, the wonderful thing about thinking about these sorts of ‘big questions’ is the surprising places they lead you to. This system presents itself as a way of protecting fragile or dangerous drugs until they can be delivered to a specific site in the human body. In fact, one can exploit the fact that cancerous tumours happen to be acidic, this stimuli can trigger the release of incarcerated drugs and allow for more effective delivery of medicine to where it is most needed in the body.

So – where did life come from? I can’t answer that just yet, but maybe one day we will, and maybe along the way, we’ll discover new technologies that can help all life – to live for a bit longer.

A picture of the samples as I make them:

And how they look under a microscope after I stimulate them with acid:

I joke but work is work right?! Well, I get up, head to the gym for an hour, rock up to the office, answer my e-mails which are generally about Outreach and upkeep of instruments in the lab that I am responsible for. Then I’ll review the work I did the day before and compare it to my to do list and my overall goals for the project I’m working on.  I have two at the moment, the first I’m writing up into a paper, the scientists way of saying I think this is really interesting and you might think it is too, before sharing it in a publication, our version of Tumblr, and the other is still very much experimentally based. To work on that, I’ll read a paper or two on similar experiments and then head into the lab to play! And by play I mean make the experiment suit my chemicals and equipment. As scientists we have to make sure that we try not to put any bias into the research, so instead of posing questions like, I expect that if I do this to my system it should respond thusly, we might ask: I wonder what will happen if I change this in my system and then rationalise the results after the fact. Oftentimes many of the machines I want to use to investigate my samples are booked up during the day so I’ll stay in the evenings or on the weekends to use them – and that’s great because I then get to listen to my music loud! After all that, I’ll probably head home, cook some chilli, my speciality with lentils, watch an episode of Game of Thrones with my housemates, and then hit the hay!

A few pictures:

My Lab

My Bench in the Lab

My Office

My Desk in the Office