The amazing complexity and diversity of life is a result of billions of years of evolution. But how did the process of evolution itself begin? Szostak will describe how efforts to design and build very simple living cells are testing our assumptions about the nature of life, generating ideas about how life emerged from the chemistry of the early earth, and even offering clues as to how modern life evolved from its earliest ancestors.

Jack Szostak is Professor of Genetics at the Faculty of Medicine at Harvard, Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University, a researcher at the Howard Hughes, and Distinguished Research Alexander Rich Medical Institute at the Department of Molecular Biology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2009 along with Elizabeth Blackburn and Carol Greider, "for the discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase". His research interests include the study of lipid vesicles capable reproduce and integration with RNA replication as a model of the first steps in cellular evolution. He received the Urey Medal of the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life (ISSOL) in 2011.

The lecture by Professor Szostak is part of the program Meetings Excellence, Campus of International Excellence. The visit of Harvard scientist has been organized by the Institute of Integrative Systems Biology (I2SysBio, Joint Center University of Valencia-CSIC), the Cavanilles Institute of Biodiversity and Evolutionary Biology and the Microcluster for Integrative Evolutionary Biology, with the collaboration of the Real Colegio Complutense of Harvard and the “InnoTalk” program of the social innovation living lab of the University of Valencia [SocInnoLAB].