Origins

by Carl Zimmer

As I was working on my essay on the evolution of eukaryotes, I spoke a lot to Nick Lane. Lane is trained as a biochemist, but he's also a prolific author (most recently of the book Life Ascending). As a result, Lane is that particularly rare breed: a scientist who can not only offer a bird's-eye view of an entire field but also tell you about his own very interesting ideas. Now Lane has just won a prize to spend the next 3 years further exploring some of those ideas.

Lane is the first winner of the £150,000 Provost's Venture Research Prize, awarded by the University College London, where Lane has been an honorary reader since 2006. According to UCL, "the Provost's Venture Research Prize will go to UCL researchers whose ideas challenge the norm and have the potential to substantially change the way we think about an important subject."

Lane won the award for his proposal to tackle a few simple but profound questions:

Why have complex cells evolved only once in 4 billion years? Why do they share many unexpected traits like sex and senescence? If these traits offer a selective advantage, why do bacteria not take advantage? On current thinking, the answers to these questions should arise from genetics, but a narrowly genetic perspective suggests that complex life should evolve repeatedly.

Lane plans to flesh out a hypothesis I described in my essay: He suspects that a rare merging of two species made this complexity possible. Only after our single-celled ancestors engulfed bacteria (that are now mitochondria) did they get enough energy to build and run a complex cell.

"It will start out mostly theoretical," Lane wrote me in an e-mail. "I want to piece together a broad framework from the full breadth of the literature." Lane will then launch a series of experiments to test his idea—"through collaborations with labs who know what they're doing."