The Engine That Built Life. Nick Lane - #541

Please join my mailing list here 👉 to win a meteorite 💥 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 ------------------------------------------------------ ➡️ Follow Nick Lane 🌐 Website: 📚 Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death: Join this channel to get access to perks like monthly Office Hours: 📚 Get my books: Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner, with productivity tips from 9 Nobel Prize winners: Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner, with life-changing interviews with 9 Nobel Prizewinners: My tell-all cosmic memoir Losing the Nobel Prize: The first-ever audiobook from Galileo: Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican Follow me to ask questions of my guests: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: 🔔

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The Engine That Built Life. Nick Lane - #541 is an episode from Into the Impossible With Brian Keating by Brian Keating .

This episode is 74:48 long.

This episode was published on Mar 3, 2026.

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