Lee Cronin: evaluation

Transcript context

…So the better the whiskey, the higher the assembly index, the higher the assembly index, the better the whiskey. I mean, I really love deep, peaty Scottish whiskeys. Near my house, there is one of the lowland distilleries, called Glengoyne. It’s still beautiful whiskey but not as complex. So for fun, I took some Glengoyne whiskey in our bag and put them into the mass spec and measured the assembly index. I also got E. coli. So the way we do it, take the E. coli, break the cell apart, take it all apart. And also got some beer. And people were ridiculing us saying, “Oh, beer is evidence of complexity.” And one of the computational complexity people, it was just throwing, yeah… He’s very vigorous in his disagreement of assembly theory, was just saying, “You don’t know what you’re doing. Even beer is more complicated than human.” What he didn’t realize is that it’s not beer, per se, it’s taking the yeast extract, taking the extract, breaking the cells, extracting the molecules, and just looking at the profile of the molecules, see if there’s anything over the threshold. And we also put in a really complex molecule, Taxol. So we took all of these, but also NASA gave us, I think, five samples, and they wouldn’t tell us what they are. They said, “No, we don’t believe you’re going to get this to work.” And they really gave us some super complex samples. And they gave us two fossils, one that was a million years old and one was at 10,000 years old, something from Antarctica, seabed. They gave us some Murchison and meteorite, and a few others. Put them through the system. So we took all the samples, treat them all identically, put them into mass spec, fragmented them, counted. And in this case, implicit in the measurement was we, in mass spec, you only detect peaks when you’ve got more than, say, let’s say 10,000 identical molecules. So the copy number’s already baked in, but wasn’t quantified, which is super important there. This was in the first paper. Because I was like, it’s abundant, of course. And when you then took it all out, we found that the biological samples gave you molecules that had an assembly index greater than 15. And all the abiotic samples were less than 15. And then we took the NASA samples and we looked at the ones that were more than 15, less than 15, and we gave them back to NASA, and they’re like, “Oh, gosh. Yep, dead, living, dead, living. You got it.” And that’s what we found on earth. That’s a success.…

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