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Wealthy investors offer a $ 10 million prize to the first scientific team to create a genetic code from simple chemicals, replicating the unknown process that led billions of years to DNA as a vector of information transmission in life on Earth.
The Evolution 2.0 Award is an initiative of Perry Marshall, a Chicago-based marketing entrepreneur. It will be judged by leading scientists, including George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard University, and Denis Noble, a biologist at Oxford University, who was the first to model the human heart on a computer.
"The biggest problems in today's science are: how life started and what is the origin of the genetic code," said Professor Noble. "We want to know if the way information is encoded in DNA is the result of a random or if there are good chemical reasons why the code should be such that it is."
Marshall is a Christian who once espoused "intelligent design" – the controversial idea, rejected by most scientists, that evolution is the result of divine guidance. But he denied that Evolution 2.0 was a salvo in favor of a clever design that would claim that the origin of life was a divine miracle that scientists could not discover.
The price rules state that the challenge is to "discover a purely chemical process that will generate, transmit and receive a simple code – a process by which chemicals self-organize into a code without the benefit of a single code. a designer ".
Other sponsors of the award include marketing executive Robert Skrob, chief investment officer Gary Klopfenstein, and chief executive Jon Correll. Their involvement is not purely altruistic. All $ 10 million will be awarded solely to a patentable coding system, which the sponsors of the prize will attempt to market in partnership with the winner.
All known life uses a triplet genetic code. DNA has four chemical "letters", represented by G, A, T and C, which are read in groups of three; each triplet encodes a constitutive block of the protein, the active molecule of life. But no one knows how this ultra-sophisticated information transfer system was developed about 4 billion years ago with relatively simple chemicals then on Earth.
Evolution 2.0 is a sign that biology is putting more and more emphasis on viewing life primarily as a chemical system and watching the flow of information through living creatures.
The price could be earned by producing a coding system such as DNA from scratch or by proposing something very different chemically. "We do not even know if this can be won – if someone can set up a self-creative information transmission system," said Professor Noble.
Marshall is convinced that any winning system will have huge commercial potential, although its applications are impossible to predict in advance. "I think it would be as important for science and technology as the invention of the transistor," he said.
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