Speaker –

Professor Nick Lane

Nick Lane (PhD, FRSB, FLS) is Professor of Evolutionary Biochemistry in the Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment at University College London.

Prof Lane’s research is on the way that energy flow has shaped evolution over 4 billion years, using a mixture of theoretical and experimental work to address the origin of life, the evolution of complex cells and downright peculiar behaviour such as sex. He was a founding member of the UCL Consortium for Mitochondrial Research, and is Co-Director of the UCL Centre for Life’s Origin and Evolution (CLOE). He was awarded the 2009 UCL Provost’s Venture Research Prize, the 2011 BMC Research Award for Genetics, Genomics, Bioinformatics and Evolution, the 2015 Biochemical Society Award for his outstanding contribution to molecular life sciences and 2016 Royal Society Michael Faraday Prize and Lecture, the UK’s premier award for excellence in communicating science.

Nick Lane is the author of five acclaimed books on evolutionary biochemistry, which have sold more than 150,000 copies worldwide, and been translated into 25 languages.

Nick’s most recent book, Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death (Profile/Norton 2022) explores the elusive chemical logic of life. Nick shows that the flux of energy and matter brings the Earth to life and our own lives to an end, along the way explaining the emergence of genetic information and even consciousness. Revolving around the Krebs cycle, an amazing conflicted merry-go round of energy and matter at the heart of life, the book lays bare the stories of the flawed geniuses who pioneered our understanding of biochemistry, uniting the story of our planet with the story of our cells, from photosynthesis to ageing and cancer.