Stars, Planets, Life

What's It Like For a Working Scientist To Write a Novel?

What's It Like For a Working Scientist To Write a Novel?

Jul 28, 2016

In an essay for The New York Times, (September 28, 2002) Joseph Epstein wrote: "According to a recent survey, 81 percent of Americans feel they have a book in them -- and that they should write it. As the author of 14 books, with a 15th to be published next spring, I'd like to use this space to do what I can to discourage them."     Christopher Hitchens had a similar sentiment: “Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay.”  

Dave Deamer

Dave Deamer

My research focuses on a variety of topics related to membrane biophysics, including the origin of cell membranes and the use of transmembrane nanopores to analyze nucleic acids. Over the past 25 years, my lab has been supported by grants from NIH, N…
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Life’s beginnings: Hypotheses and Plausibility

Life’s beginnings: Hypotheses and Plausibility

    One of the earliest scientific speculations about the origin of life was Alexander Oparin’s proposal in 1924 that life began as jelly-like blobs he called coacervates. Oparin knew that the unit of life was the cell, but it had not yet been established that cells had membranous boundaries,  so coacervates were thought to be reasonable experimental models of the “protoplasm” that seemed to compose all cells.  Oparin also discussed conditions on the early Earth as part of the story, setting the stage for what would later become astrobiology.

Sufficient Complexity And Combinatorial Chemistry In Stars, Planets And Life

Sufficient Complexity And Combinatorial Chemistry In Stars, Planets And Life

How did life begin, anyway?     I am a research professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and over the past 30 years my students and I have been working to understand how cellular life arose. The unit of all life today is the cell, a molecular system of functional polymers (proteins and nucleic acids) that is bounded by a membrane composed of lipid.