Speaker:
Professor Nick Lane
Bio:
Nick Lane is Professor of Evolutionary Biochemistry and Director of the UCL Centre for Life’s Origins and Evolution (CLOE) at University College London. His research is on how energy flow has shaped the trajectory of evolution from the origin of life to the evolution of complex eukaryotic cells and the emergence of traits such as sex, ageing and even consciousness. Nick has published more than 130 papers in leading journals including Nature, Cell and Science, and written five celebrated books which have been translated into 30 languages. He was awarded the Royal Society Science Book Prize for Life Ascending in 2010 and the Michael Faraday Prize for excellence in communicating science to UK audiences in 2016.Bill Gates called The Vital Question “an amazing inquiry into the origins of life”.
Date:
7 October 2026
Time:
7:30pm – 9:00pm
Add to your calendar
7 October 2026 19:30
7 October 2026 21:00
Europe/London
Lecture: Professor Nick Lane
Summary
What brings the Earth to life and our own lives to an end? The answer is not 42, but something equally anodyne – the Krebs cycle. Most people learn about the Krebs cycle in school as a simple set of reactions used to generate energy in cells. But we are not usually taught that it can also run backwards to turn simple gases into living matter. Or that this could be how life on Earth began. Or that this tension between creation and destruction – between burning organic molecules in respiration and forming them anew from gases – underpins ageing and diseases like cancer. And we’re definitely not told that this tension might be the physical basis of subjective feelings. I will show how the Krebs cycle connects all these amazing things.
