Harvard Origins of Life Initiative rings in 10 years with a trip to the stars
Ten years ago, Dimitar Sasselov worried that his graduate students studying the origins of life might have trouble finding jobs after leaving Harvard. The past decade, however, has seen an explosion of exoplanet discoveries, rising excitement about the prospect of finding extraterrestrial life, and advances in understanding of life on Earth. Needless to say, those early worries have mostly vanished. Sasselov is Phillips Professor of Astronomy and director of the Harvard Origins of Life Initiative, which hosted a two-day symposium this week marking 10 years since the initiative’s founding in 2006. The project has grown along with the fledgling field, fed by a flood of data from telescopes probing the skies, fieldwork exploring early life on Earth, and labs investigating the chemistry of that all-important transition from primordial soup to first life. The symposium, held at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, featured lectures and panel discussions about recent discoveries...