Jack Szostak wants to understand the chemical and physical processes that facilitated the origin and early evolution of life on Earth. To explore these processes, Szostak and his team are trying to build a model of a primitive cell, or protocell, that has the minimum capabilities to self-replicate and evolve. Through their work, they hope to gain insight into some of the universal properties of modern cells, and how modern cells arose from their simpler ancestors. They are also on the lookout for chemical or physical phenomena that might have practical utility in biomedical research.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced today that Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator Jennifer Doudna of University of California, Berkeley, and Emmanuelle Charpentier of the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens are the recipients of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the development of a method for genome editing. HHMI researcher Jack Szostak wins 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Scientists have demonstrated how protocells might have taken up nutrients from the earth’s early environment to propel their growth.