Policy Punchline

Lee Cronin is a chemist and the Regius Chair of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow. He has been elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Royal Society of Chemistry, and has published over 350 papers and given hundreds of lectures. He also heads the Cronin Group, a lab that is “motivated by the fascination for complex chemical systems, and the desire to construct complex functional molecular architectures that are not based on biologically derived building blocks.” He and his team are trying to make artificial life forms, find alien life, explore the digitization of chemistry, understand how information can be encoded into chemicals and construct chemical computers, and create complex molecular architecture not necessarily based on biological building blocks. We start by discussing non-carbon-based lifeforms. Dr. Cronin’s interest in this subject comes from an aversion to assuming that carbon is the only life-permitting foundational molecule. He has created inorganic chemical cell