In the unceasing biochemical quest to understand the origin of life, creating life in a laboratory is one of the most challenging tasks. TU/e’s Distinguished University Professor Bert Meijer will discuss why, despite all the research efforts, this remains impossible.
“The origin of life on Earth” is without doubt one of the most intriguing scientific topics. The enormous progress in science and technology over the past few decades has provided many deep insights into the composition, functioning and transformation of living systems, which are truly miraculous. Today, we can clone sheep and grow organs from stem cells, while cells, plants, animals and bacteria have been genetically modified. Furthermore, the synthesis of small and large molecules has become so sophisticated that almost every molecule found on Earth can now be produced in a laboratory, including long strands of DNA, proteins, and complex drugs capable of curing diseases. These many insights, however, also demonstrate the enormous complexity of the chemical biology of living cells. Consequently, the question of how life could ever have originated has become even more intriguing.
In this lecture, Prof. Meijer will illustrate the key challenges encountered while trying to understand the origin of life on Earth, including an explanation of why, despite all the research efforts, it will take a very, very long time to make a living cell in a laboratory out of its individual components for the first time in history – if it is possible at all. Special attention will be paid to the self-organization of complex molecular systems as a critical step in the building process.
About the speaker
Prof. Dr. E.W. “Bert” Meijer is Distinguished University Professor in the Molecular Sciences, Professor of Organic Chemistry at the Eindhoven University of Technology and founder of the Institute for Complex Molecular Systems. Bert Meijer is a member of many editorial advisory boards and editor of the Journal of the American Chemical Society. He has received a number of prestigious awards, including the Spinoza Award (2001), the ACS Award for Polymer Chemistry (2006), the ACS Cope Scholar Award (2012), the Prelog medal (2014), the Nagoya Gold Medal (2017), the GDCh Staudinger Preis (2022), the Grand Prix de la Maison de la Chemie (2025). Prof. Meijer is a member of several academies and societies, including the US National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Science, where he is appointed to Academy Professor in 2014.
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