The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death

Science & Cocktails is proud to announce an episode with biochemist Nick Lane, Professor of Evolutionary Biochemistry and Director of the Centre for Life’s Origins and Evolution (CLOE) at University College London and author of the book "The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death", who will tell you about what are the building blocks of life. All this after A PLANE TO CATCH plays salsa, afrobeat and fused sound.

Tickets

• Seated tickets are paid.
• Standing tickets are free and valid until 8pm. This means that you should enter before 8pm and can stay the entire event.
• After 8pm we let people in on a first come, first served basis.

What is the event about?

How did life on Earth begin? Why did animals evolve so quickly in the ‘Cambrian explosion’? Why is the same biochemical cycle used to create and destroy? Can bacteria feel pain? What brings our own lives to an end?

What brings the Earth to life and our own lives to an end? The answer is not 42, but something equally anodyne – the Krebs cycle. Most people learn about the Krebs cycle in school as a simple set of reactions used to generate energy in cells. But we are not usually taught that it can also run backwards to turn simple gases into living matter. Or that this could be how life on Earth began. Or that this tension between creation and destruction – between burning organic molecules in respiration and forming them anew from gases – underpins ageing and diseases such as cancer. We are definitely not told that this tension might give rise to consciousness itself. Nick Lane will tell you about these things over a cocktail or two.

More info here:

About Nick Lan

Carl Bergstrom is a Professor of Biology at the University of Washington. Though trained in mathematical evolutionary biology, Carl addresses a broad range of problems across natural and social sciences with a unifying theme of how information flows. Within biology, Carl studies problems such as how communication evolves and how natural selection puts information into the genome. In the philosophy and sociology of science, he studies how the incentives created by scientific institutions shape scholars’ research strategies and, in turn, our scientific understanding of the world. In network science, he explores how to extract the relevant information from massive networks comprising tens of millions of nodes, and how information flows through networks of this scale. In recent years he has started to focus on how social media and large language models facilitate the spread of disinformation, and what we as a society can do about it.

About A PLANE TO CATCH

The band consists of some of Denmark's leading young Danish jazz musicians and plays exclusively original compositions. With inspiration from musicians such as Maceo Parker, Fela Kuti, Al Green, Eddie Harris, James Brown and many others, the band has found its very own funk, soul, latin, salsa, afrobeat, fused sound. And with extensive experience from the Danish and international music scene, this new orchestra delivers instrumental dance music in a class of its own.

Event held in English and with the generous support of the Novo Nordisk Foundation