It's an incendiary chemical.

So the challenge then is, throw away all your pure chemicals in the lab, and try to make some protocells with lifelike properties from this kind of primordial ooze.

For example, that's how we can make the quad hover.

Oh my goodness. Here we go again,

And the nature of a given cell driving its underlying biochemistry is dictated by which of these 25,000 genes are turned on and at what level they're turned on.

Now this quest started four billion years ago on planet Earth.

The unique character of both individual neurons and neurons within a collection of the brain are driven by fundamental properties of their underlying biochemistry.

Most of these don't contain DNA, but yet they have lifelike properties.

Evolution acts as a sieve. It sieves out the bad variation.

I want you to think about how you design computer programs to solve particular problems.

That's what emergence means.

We're similar at the genetic level.

Chemicals.

When matter is changed chemically, chemical energy is given off.

and chemical agents.

And then evolution used those body plans to evolve higher cognitive functions, and biological evolution kept accelerating.

Here, this is a protocell, and it's vigorously shedding this skin.

We already know that chemicals

Connection between life and radioactive nuclei is straightforward.

And so, there's a game of predator prey that's going to be, essentially, universal, really, in any kind of biological system.

There's many physiological processes that are influenced by the acidity of the ocean.

This is natural from the environment, this clay.

Through chemical composition and physical attributes, homogeneous portion of matter that separated from its environment in its expansion through a surface.

All those chemicals they had you working around?

Life is a fatal sexually transmitted disease.

It contained harmful chemicals.

But these protocells satisfy these general requirements of living systems.

And guess what, it's not our grandparents' chicken either.

But life begins, what does that mean?

How is it that a receiving brain can be rewired?

This is not like human insulin this is the same protein that is chemically indistinguishable from what comes out of your pancreas.

They are not alive, you know that they're not alive, and yet somehow they manage to evoke a sense of life.

It's a flying laboratory that we took to make measurements in the region of this molecule.

Mr. White... from Chemistry.

Now that's sort of just a very simple chemical form of life, but when things got interesting was when these drops

I like to call it an almost infinite sameness from day to day.

Evolution in Middle World has not equipped us to handle very improbable events we don't live long enough.

Together, we decided to set out on two missions.

It's an extraordinarily toxic thing.

OK

Maybe they're college kids. Chem students trying to make a big score.

And chemically separating things is like a bazillion times easier than isotopically separating it.

We had to solve the chemistry for making large DNA molecules, and we had to solve the biological side of how, if we had this new chemical entity, how would we boot it up, activate it in a recipient cell.

They're exposed to chemicals like chloropicrin, which was originally used as a nerve gas.

That's how bioluminescence works they're talking with these chemical words.