Have we found a new way of defining life? This scientist thinks so.

Lee Cronin, the Regius Chair of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow, proposes that Assembly Theory may hold the key to discovering how life began and evolved. His theory introduces three parameters for understanding the transition from nonliving to living entities: the time it takes to make the object, the time it takes for the object to fall apart naturally, and the time the object can persist in living lineages. These parameters help to quantify life by calculating a system's construction, which measures the extent of selection that has occurred.

In his laboratory, Cronin and his team have used this concept to create an "origin of life machine." It aims to replicate the conditions that allow life to emerge from nonliving materials. By leveraging these time-based parameters, Cronin and his team are constructing engines designed to perform random chemistry experiments, seeking systems that exhibit these life-like characteristics.

If successful, this research could completely change how we think about where life came from —and its future.

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About Lee Cronin:

Leroy Cronin has one of the largest multidisciplinary, chemistry-based research teams in the world. He has given over 300 international talks and has authored over 350 peer-reviewed papers with recent work published in Nature, Science, and PNAS. He and his team are trying to make artificial life forms, find alien life, explore the digitization of chemistry, understand how information can be encoded into chemicals, and construct chemical computers.

He went to the University of York where he completed both a degree and PhD in chemistry and then went on to do postdocs in Edinburgh and Germany before becoming a lecturer at the Universities of Birmingham, and then Glasgow where he has been since 2002, working up the ranks to become the Regius Professor of Chemistry in 2013 at age 39.

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Do we inhabit a multiverse? Do we have free will? What is love? Is evolution directional? There are no simple answers to life’s biggest questions, and that’s why they’re the questions occupying the world’s brightest minds.

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