ASTID

XV International Conference on the Origin of Life – a Personal Perspective

September 26, 2008 / Written by: Andrew Pohorille

XV International Conference on the Origin of Life was held in beautiful Florence on August 24-29, 2008. There were two types of oral presentations at the meeting – 45 min or 1 h invited lectures and 15 min contributed talks. There were also very extensive poster sessions. Oral presentations were divided along traditional thematic lines. The first session was devoted to planetary evolution and the habitat for early life. Current views on the formation of planetary system were comprehensively reviewed by Alan Boss. This might be considered as an introduction to the next ISSOL meeting, which will be held jointly with the Bioastronomy Conference. In his talk on the evolution of the primitive atmosphere, Jim Kasting suggested that the early Earth might have been warm rather than hot. This suggestion appears to be in accord with the recent phylogenetic evidence presented by Jim Lake that the last common ancestor was mesophilic or moderately thermophilic, but not hyperthermophilic. The next groups of talks addressed prebiotic chemistry, both terrestrial and extraterrestrial. The latter was reviewed in the John Oro lecture by Sandra Pizzarello.

A large number of presentations dealt with the emergence of functional polymers and protocellular systems. As has been the case in recent meetings, a considerable fraction of them were devoted to different aspect of the RNA World. In particular Gerry Joyce talked about continuous in vitro evolution experiments on cross-replicating RNA enzymes and efforts to sustain a diverse population of rybozymes. Although the relevance of this work to the actual emergence of life is far from clear, these experiments provide a fascinating view at different general mechanisms that might have been at play during protocellular evolution. Fortunately, other topics important to understanding the emergence of life, such as transport across cell membranes and bioenergetics were also addressed. It appears to me that the field needs integration of these different lines of research, and this does not seem to be happening yet. Perhaps the closest to this goal are Jack Szostak’s efforts to construct a protobiologically relevant model of a protocell that he discussed in the Leslie Orgel lecture. This has been the third time that I heard Jack speak on this subject in the last year and I am impressed by the rapid progress that he has been making. However, the most difficult task – finding a simple information polymer capable of self-replication – is still in front of him.

The last group of talks addressed a possibility of extraterrestrial life. Cleary the most promising and attainable target is Mars. It seems that determining through robotic exploration whether there is extant or extinct life there will be a difficult and time-consuming task that will involve careful site selection and sample return mission. In this context, other targets in the solar system, such as Titan, do not seem very promising to me. At least this was my impression from a very good talk by Athena Coustenis. This does not imply, however, that exploring the moons of Jupiter and Saturn is not a worthwhile endeavor, as it can teach us a lot about the formation of our solar system and universal cosmochemistry.

My main criticism of the meeting is a small number of oral presentations – only 54 (17 full length lectures and 37 contributed papers) – for 350 participants. I fully support the traditional format of the Conference that does not allow for parallel sessions, because it helps to retain the interdisciplinary nature of meeting. Considering this constraint, perhaps a better formula is to reduce the number of invited lectures while increasing the number of contributed talks selected from submitted abstracts. Also, I would like to see at least 20% of all talks given by graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. I hope that the organizers of the next ISSOL (see the right side of this page) will consider this suggestion.

As always, the meeting was an opportunity to award several outstanding members of the Society. The winner of the Oparin Medal, the highest ISSOL honor, was Jim Kasting. Soon we will have a feature about Jim’s work on this site. Among other awardees was the former president of ISSOL, Antonio Lazcano, who received a gold medal. Antonio led the Society for a number of years with both sure hand and personal charm. ISSOL also elected its new president – Janet Siefert from Rice University. Janet inherited a society that is in a very good shape. The number of members markedly increased and its finances are sound, greatly enhanced by the generous endowment from Stanley Miller. Janet will also face some important challenges, in particular how to integrate ISSOL with astrobiology and bioastronomy without loosing its identity. We hope that we will soon hear more from Janet on this and other subjects important to the field of the origin of life.