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Suzan Mazur - Latest News [Page 2]
Origin Of Life Soufflé Rises
Wednesday, 13 March 2013, 11:40 am | Suzan Mazur
Covering a recent Origin of Life meeting at CERN on the outskirts of Geneva, I was surprised to learn that I'd been made a member of Atlas, the particle physics experiment at CERN. As such, I probably qualified for a room at the CERN hotel (dormitory), ... More >>
Steve Benner: Let's Discuss Origin of Life on Charlie Rose
Tuesday, 19 February 2013, 10:33 am | Suzan Mazur
Steve Benner describes himself as a "crackpot synthetic biologist to some extent" (i.e., he thinks outside the box). Benner pioneered synthetic biology, for example, and in 1984, generated the first synthetic gene to encode an enzyme. More >>
Loren Williams: "The Original RNA World Model Is Dead"
Friday, 15 February 2013, 4:06 pm | Suzan Mazur
I met Loren Williams at the recent NASA-sponsored Origins of Life conference at Princeton. He was one of the liveliest questioners, always pitching with a relaxed focus. Williams is a professor of biochemistry at Georgia Institute of Technology and Principal Investigator ... More >>
Autocatalytic Sets Center Stage - Princeton Origins of Life
Wednesday, 30 January 2013, 12:01 pm | Suzan Mazur
As British chemist John Sutherland et al . exited following their conference presentations and other invited guests were no-shows, the Princeton Origins of Life event further opened up to the public, which invigorated proceedings. More >>
RNA World Defenders Take Center Stage at Princeton | Mazur
Wednesday, 23 January 2013, 5:59 pm | Suzan Mazur
John Sutherland, the British chemist and winner of the Lonsdale Origin of Life Challenge last year with Matthew Powner, opened day two of the Princeton conference talking about a new holistic approach to the problem, a theme he hinted at several years ... More >>
Suzan Mazur: Princeton Origins of Life Conference Streamed
Monday, 21 January 2013, 7:45 pm | Suzan Mazur
In a couple of emails to me, Andrew Pohorille, the most senior NASA scientist working in the Origin of Life field, objected to my recent interview with Arizona State University's Sara Walker , one of the featured speakers at Princeton's Origins of Life conference ... More >>
Princeton Powwow: RNA World's Last Hurrah?
Wednesday, 16 January 2013, 3:05 pm | Suzan Mazur
"I think we need to move away from treating a strict RNA world scenario as the central accepted answer for the origin of life because most of the origin of life community don't think that's the definitive answer." -- Sara Imari Walker More >>
Pier Luigi Luisi: Origin of Life Mindstorms Needed
Wednesday, 19 December 2012, 12:11 pm | Suzan Mazur
The work of Pier Luigi Luisi continues in the best tradition of Italian visionaries of science and the humanities, Alberti, da Vinci, Galileo, Michelangelo. Luisi is currently chair of biochemistry at the University of Roma Tre and director of the ... More >>
Steen Rasmussen: The Flag Bearer Of Artificial Life
Friday, 7 December 2012, 6:02 pm | Suzan Mazur
Hal (2001)? Roy (Blade Runner)? Terminator? Dinosaurs of Jurassic Park? Danish physicist Steen Rasmussen thinks seriously about sci-fi scenarios most of us see as Hollywood entertainment. But then Rasmussen is the flag bearer of Artificial Life and was one ... More >>
Stu Kauffman: Europe's Origin of Life Summit
Friday, 2 November 2012, 12:53 pm | Suzan Mazur
"You're in the Village, you can't look at the biosphere," joked Stu Kauffman, the legendary Complexity pioneer, in a conversation from Seattle with me in Greenwich Village, just days before Hurricane Sandy shut down New York, leaving Manhattan south ... More >>
Carl Woese, Evolution's Golden Revolutionary
Thursday, 4 October 2012, 3:27 pm | Suzan Mazur
With the 2012 Nobel Prize announcements coming up next week, I am reminded that there is probably no other scientist but Carl Woese who could write about having "no use for natural selection" and have Nature magazine respond with a Nobel endorsement. More >>
An Archipelago of Perfumes: The Legacy of Alex Cockburn
Monday, 10 September 2012, 2:59 pm | Suzan Mazur
As a journalist challenging the official line, Alexander Cockburn was sublime. He is greatly missed. I first remember Alex's lively reporting in the 1970s Village Voice. The Arabian Gulf was looming large, and Alex was articulating its deeper politics. More >>
Edward C. Caswell's Greenwich Village
Thursday, 30 August 2012, 6:58 pm | Suzan Mazur
Before Manhattan's West Village became one of America's financially richest zipcodes, a neighborhood of noisy outdoor eateries, Madison Avenue shops and streets cordoned off by television crews -- it was a quiet place to live, a culturally rich community, ... More >>
Deeper into the Dorak Treasure Hoax
Thursday, 23 August 2012, 5:26 pm | Suzan Mazur
British journalist David Aaronovitch commented recently in The Times of London's editorial pages on the death of archaeologist James Mellaart, whose passing has largely gone unnoticed in the media even though Mellaart's discoveries in Turkey in the late ... More >>
Remembering Gore Vidal & the Imperial Ladies of Rome
Thursday, 2 August 2012, 4:54 pm | Suzan Mazur
Gore Vidal was expecting me at his flat that morning on the Via de Torre Argentina in Rome. He had agreed to an interview for the American edition of GEO magazine (which was about to go belly-up, although I didn't know it). The subject was Caligula and ... More >>
Doron Lancet: The Origin and Synthesis of Life
Wednesday, 25 July 2012, 10:51 am | Suzan Mazur
Since the investigation into who we are and where we came from increasingly involves creating a living cell with modern chemicals that may not have existed on early Earth -- should we even continue to call the research origin of life? Weizmann Institute ... More >>
David Deamer: 1st Life & "The Lonsdale 8"
Tuesday, 10 July 2012, 5:26 pm | Suzan Mazur
David Deamer's trailblazing of prebiotics goes back to 1977 and a paper on lipids and membranes published in Nature, but his curiosity about origin of life dates to his teenage spelunking adventures growing up in Ohio in the 1950s. More >>
Freeman Dyson: Yes, "Garbage Bag World" Origins
Thursday, 28 June 2012, 5:29 pm | Suzan Mazur
Several weeks ago the Lonsdale prize went to researchers who think first life was RNA, a replicating creature. So I rang up Freeman Dyson, emeritus professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, to see if he still embraces the idea that ... More >>
Origin of Life, the Pack & the Prize: Lawrence Krauss
Tuesday, 19 June 2012, 10:04 am | Suzan Mazur
We like Harry Lonsdale and his generosity to science. But Lonsdale's Origin of Life Challenge dollars, $200,000 of them, went to a team of British academics, a red flag perhaps that American researchers increasingly prefer the stage to the lab, as well ... More >>
Life and Non-Life Are Artificial Categories: Maggie Turnbull
Friday, 8 June 2012, 4:53 pm | Suzan Mazur
Maggie Turnbull prizes her independence as a scientist. Turnbull's an authority on habitable star systems. Touted in the media as a genius astrobiologist, and with an asteroid named after her, she says life is an artificial category. More >>
