Molecular Origins of Life, Munich 2026

Sitzung

Session G

12.06.2026, 14:00

LMU Munich - Great (Große) Aula

26. Information at the Dawn of Life

Jack Szostak (University of Chicago)

12.06.26, 14:00

Jack Szostak

An organism’s genome encodes information about how to live in the world. This means information about the internal world, the organism itself, its structure, metabolism and its replication, but also information about the external world, how to sense and respond to it. The information that is coded in the genome is learned over evolutionary time as replication errors result in a...

16. The Potential for Life in Non-Water Solvents Motivated by Venus

Sara Seager (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

12.06.26, 14:25

Sara Seager

Scientists have speculated for over half a century that Venus might be habitable—not on its scorching surface, but in the much cooler cloud layer 48 to 60 km above the planet. The concept is that Venus’ perpetual cloud cover might host simple single-celled life, as Earth’s clouds do. The Venus clouds, however, are not made of water but are composed of concentrated sulfuric...

27. TBA

Lijun Zhou (University of Pennsylvania)

12.06.26, 14:50

40. Moderated Discussion - Session G

12.06.26, 15:15