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The 5 core principles of life | Nobel Prize-winner Paul Nurse

Big Think | October 18, 2024



Nobel Prize-winning scientist Paul Nurse defines the 5 core principles of life.

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What is the essence of being alive? This is the question that geneticist and cell biologist Paul Nurse dissects in his book What Is Life? At the core of life is the cell — an entity that can grow, divide, and reproduce. 

Using yeast as a model organism, Nurse discovered a similarity in cell reproduction mechanisms between yeast and humans, hinting at a shared ancestral origin for all life. This commonality extends to genes, the units of inheritance, first recognized in pea plants by Gregor Mendel. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection proposes that life adapts and evolves, favoring traits — and the genes that encode them — that are advantageous for survival. 

The essence of life, therefore, is a complex orchestration of chemistry and information management that allows organisms to adapt and persist through inheritance.

0:00 The big question of biology
0:57 1. The Cell
2:41 2. The Gene
3:28 3. Evolution by natural selection
4:20 4. Chemistry
5:20 5. Information
6:27 What is life?

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About Paul Nurse:
Paul Nurse, Ph.D, is a British biochemist. He was awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Leland H. Hartwell and R. Timothy Hunt for their discoveries regarding cell cycle regulation by cyclin and cyclin dependent kinases. He became Rockefeller University’s ninth president in 2003.

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Read more of our stories biology:
Biology’s unsolved chicken-or-egg problem: Where did life come from?
https://bigthink.com/the-well/biology-chicken-or-egg-origin-of-life/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=video&utm_campaign=youtube_description
What does it look like to “turn on” a gene?
https://bigthink.com/health/turn-on-genes/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=video&utm_campaign=youtube_description
“Spooky” quantum biology might cause your DNA to mutate
https://bigthink.com/hard-science/quantum-biology-mutation/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=video&utm_campaign=youtube_description

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Comments

This post currently has 26 comments.

  1. @maritanas6660

    October 18, 2024 at 9:40 am

    Would you consider that ADHD could be an evolution adaptation to nowadays fast phaced world? their brain works similar to computers processing large ammounts of informotian , almost like google throws you many answers on the same question but then can really focus on something that is very interesting to them. Making it difficult to adapt to everybody elses ways of communicate, behave , study – but they can very well communicate with each other and almost talk on 3 topics at once without loosing track.

  2. @Scufflegrit

    October 18, 2024 at 9:40 am

    Listen to what he’s saying and remember that he is giving an objective description of something he opens with admitting is difficult to describe.

    Why are these comment sections always full of people yelling their own beliefs instead of listening and considering objectively?

    Evangelism won’t change hearts and minds here, and fringe beliefs have their own forums elsewhere.

  3. @plantsciences8861

    October 18, 2024 at 9:40 am

    I have a question. When a man dies, all the cells and the molecules therein are intact.. What is it that leaves the body and renders the cells non-functional(non living) at once and puts all such characteristics of life to halt?
    I believe you have again failed to define life. You have rather expressed the manifestations of life in an articulated manner. What is life itself still remains unanswered.

  4. @apollo-r5z

    October 18, 2024 at 9:40 am

    Life seems to be the ability of inert matter structures to capture solar energy and release it in a programmed manner, slowly or quickly, as may be required and to pass on this programmed function to an identical set of inert chemicals that continue the process. Before the programmed function becomes corrupted resulting in the death of the organism.
    To begin with small trickles of water from rock pools which may have become ever thicker (e.g. honey) in certain places with the addition of dissolved chemicals which combined to form long chains of molecules exposed to strong ultraviolet light from the sunshine forming the backbone for DNA, thenceforth these trickles continued, and other chemicals attached forming the basis for amino acids and primitive proteins which would no longer trickle, but folded up in pools beneath the trickles, these primitive proteins in the pools may have formed layers floating on those pools, skins with a soup of proteins below, eventually thickening due to evaporation and encapsulating the protein sou[ below in the formation of the first cells, which as rainfall continued and once more filled the pools with water may have allowed these cells to float about, and even combine with other such cells, the beginnings of binary sexual cellular reproductive activity.

  5. @pattiharrison1211

    October 18, 2024 at 9:40 am

    Molecules and cells that are programmed to function in a certain way…. Where did they come from. Information driven?? Information driven implies a Mind. An intelligent Mind.

    This points to the phenomenon or supernatural Being the Bible describes as God. Read John Lennox. His books and/or videos explain it best. Yes, these cells and molecules exist, but an intelligent mind had to design them using information and he spoke them into being. That’s what I think.

  6. @rich3419

    October 18, 2024 at 9:40 am

    So ridiculous. Advantageous?? What meaning does "advantageous" have to chemicals. A cell is exchanging information? Really? Why? How? Via midgets? Scientists are delusional about their own stories that they just make up. He has no awareness that he is just making up a story.

  7. @JimWilliams-s8z

    October 18, 2024 at 9:40 am

    Yes but remember though scientists and academia cannot explain life much less know how to build any of it yet they are 100% certain it mindlessly swirled into existence by a lRAMDOM lightning strike to mud filled ditch or a magma plume in the ocean. The debate rages on as to what mindless flopping together scenario will fly.

  8. @harryrussell154

    October 18, 2024 at 9:40 am

    From three different camps a common thread has been identified, the necessary presence of a central controlling mechanism that is maintaining this ordered universe, and the life within it. It is a logical conclusion by all three that of all that the universe is, none of it acts outside of the established order. That there is no such thing as Chaos. All is composed within 'the order of things'. Chemistry demonstrates this as mixing two chemicals together always produces the same result. Never will the result change. The established order allows for the predictability that brings new treatments for illnesses, or targeted nuclear weapon yields.

    To have arrived at the conclusion this mechanism must exist was the product of accurate research by all camps. Assigning specific theories as to what this mechanism actually was, was not.

    Camp #1 has embraced the theory of the Allele Frequency as this central mechanism because it is seen that frequencies are universally pervasive. It is not an inaccurate premise that something that spans the entire universe could contain the central mechanism.

    Camp #2 has embraced the Higgs Boson particle theory. Something again that appears to have a possible basis of probability as there are particles throughout the entire universe as well.

    Camp #3 Holds to the following of God, and that the central controlling mechanism is simply God's Holy Spirit that both created and maintains all things.

    All have a universal presence by their definitions, but not all possess the attributes required to provide the needed capabilities for a universal mechanism.

    These attributes are:

     1) The mechanism must be able to project power to be able to manipulate the inert/lifeless matter into the order, down to the smallest level.

     2) The mechanism must possess cognition to be producing, maintaining the repeating/predictable universal order in the first place.

     3) The mechanism must be able to represent something that is related to what 'life' is, that it could both create and continue it.

    Neither frequencies, nor particles, possess these attributes, making them unable to fulfill the requirements for the job.

    This leaves the Holy Spirit of God as, even in agnostic/atheist circles, as the only realistic possibility to explain the universe and all things in it. Unfortunately, agnostic/atheist people choose to cling to their own religions of non-committance rather than follow the facts and believe what the facts prove out.

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