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April 25, 2008.
Steven Benner, Distinguished Fellow at the FfAME, gave a plenary lecture at the Astrobiology Science Conference in Santa Clara last week, on the origin of life and the possibility of alien life in environments quite different from Earth. See commentary.
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February 7, 2008.
FfAME scientists, in collaboration with the University of Florida and DNA2.0, have concluded that 3.5 billion years ago life lived in a hot environment of 165° F (75° C), and gradually cooled to 100° F (40° C) by 500 million years ago. The study, published today in Nature, reconstructed ancient bacterial genes that serve as ancient thermometers. The findings are nearly identical to geological studies that estimate ancient ocean temperatures over the same time period.
• January 23, 2008.
Dr. Steven Benner, Distinguished Fellow at the FfAME, will speak on the "Scientific Method" in a public lecture sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences. The lecture will be at 8:00 in the evening at the Beckman Center on the campus of the University of California at Irvine.
• January 7, 2008.
FfAME scientists will make a multi-media presentation to residents of Oak Hammock at the University of Florida. Starting at 1:30 PM, the presentation is entitled: "The Origin of Life".
• December 1, 2007.
Dr. Steven Benner, Distinguished Fellow at the FfAME, will participate in the Space Science Symposium, Beckman Center, Irvine CA. This is one of the monthly events celebrating the second International Geophysical Year, on the 50th anniversary of the first IGY in 1957. The launch of Sputnik was the most the notable event of the IGY, and began the space age.
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October 4, 2007.
Dr. Steven Benner, Distinguished Fellow at the FfAME, will join three other panelists in a debate, open to the public, about the origin of life. The venue will be the third annual Lorne Trottier Public Science Symposium, held at McGill University in Montreal in the evening of October 4. The other panelists are Antonio Lazcano, noted expert on origins from the University of Mexico City, Robert Shapiro, author and professor emeritus at NYU, and Stuart Kauffman, mathematician and professor at the University of Calgary. Christopher McKay, astrobiologist and planetary explorer, will moderate. Work on the origins of life ongoing at the FfAME has been funded by the Astrobiology program at NASA. Click here for a primer on the debate topics.
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September 4, 2007.
Listeners of Earth & Sky will have the opportunity to hear two reports from Foundation scientists this month. The first concerns the nature of alien life. The second concerns the emerging field of synthetic biology, which FfAME scientists pioneered and which is a major research focus of the Foundation.
• August 30, 2007.
Dr. Steven Benner, distinguished fellow at the Foundation, gives a plenary lecture at the 10th International Mars Society Convention at 1pm on the campus of University of California at Los Angeles. He will speak of the potential for life on Mars and elsewhere in the solar system.
• August 20, 2007.
The Associated Press and Seth Borenstein reported today on the work on synthetic biology at the Foundation. Synthetic genetic systems developed by Foundation scientists already improve the health care of some 400,000 patients, and work in progress cited by the Associated Press promises to expand that impact in the future.
• December 18-19, 2006.
Foundation scientists supported by the Templeton Foundation will be
participating in a symposium in Tempe to decide whether we have missed
detecting a form of life on Earth quite different from the life here that
we know about.
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November 15, 2006.
A paper from Foundation scientists was the second most downloaded paper
from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in
October. See: Benner, Devine, Matveeva & Powell (2000) The missing organic molecules on
Mars. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. 97, 2425. This work was supported by NASA
through its Exobiology program.
• November 3-4, 2006.
German television will be filming an episode of Quarks on the FfAME
campus. Quarks is similar to the NOVA program from WGBH. This episode
will focus on the use of artificial DNA in human diagnostics and systems
biology research, and the likelihood of unusual genetic systems in alien
life.
• October 27, 2006.
Geological research published this week in Nature concluded that
oceans 3 billion years ago were 150° F (65° C). At this time,
common bacteria were first emerging, and must have been adapted to these
high temperatures. This remarkable conclusion was predicted three years
ago by Foundation scientists through their analysis of bacterial genomes,
and the resurrection of ancient proteins from extinct ancestral bacteria.
The Foundation work was featured last year in the Wall Street
Journal.
• October 24, 2006.
With their collaborators from the Harvard Medical School and the Scripps
Research Institute, Foundation scientists hosted a site visit of
distinguished scientists in La Jolla to present their progress to create
artificial Darwinian chemical systems as part of a
Foundation-Harvard-Scripps Center for Chemical Bonding supported by the
National Science Foundation.
• October 23, 2006.
Christopher McKay and his colleagues at NASA Ames confirmed a
prediction made by FfAME scientists in 2000, that the Viking 1976
Mars lander could have overlooked considerable amounts of organic
material on the surface of Mars (Navaro-Gonzales et al. (2006)
Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 103, 16089; Benner et al. (2000)
Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci, 97, 2425 see also Wall Street
Journal Tuesday, October 24, p B1).
• October 9, 2006.
Dr. Eric Gaucher will describe advances in 'Evolutionary Synthetic
Biology' to the Chemistry Dept. at the Scripps Research Institute in La
Jolla, CA. and the Botany Dept. at the University of Florida. This work
exploits evolutionary models in attempts to design synthetic DNA
polymerases that accept modified DNA bases. See their listings for time
and location.
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October 8, 2006.
Steven Benner, Distinguished Fellow at the Foundation for Applied
Molecular Evolution, will be this week's guest of Mat Kaplan, host of the
radio show "Planetary Radio", produced by the Planetary Society. Covering
the possibilities of extracellular life, the interview can be heard
locally on Radio NHCWX 11:00-11:30 PM, Friday October 13. Other listings
throughout the week can be found by clicking here.
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October 4, 2006.
Foundation scientists announced their
participation in the Archon X PRIZE
for Genomics competition to sequence 100 human genomes in 10 days for
a cost of less than $10,000 per genome. The announcement was made at a
gala celebration in Washington DC attended by Foundation representatives,
several Nobel laureates, and Dr. J. Craig Venter, the first human to have
his genome sequenced.
• July 28, 2006.
FfAME scientists present new data describing the chemistry behind the
origin of life at the Gordon Conference at Bates College in July. In a
major breakthrough, FfAME scientists have provided a series of chemical
steps that move simple organic molecules all of the way to the first
genetic molecules.
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July 13, 2006.
The FfAME announces the opening of The Westheimer Institute for Science
and Technology. TWIST brings together molecular science, natural history,
chemistry and medicine to provide a unique polydisciplinary education and
training program for graduate students and postdoctoral associates. Download brochure (3.5MB).
• June 15, 2006.
FfAME scientists present new data on human diagnostics at the Gordon
Conference on Stereochemistry in June. These advances include tools that
detect small RNA molecules in complex biological tissues, key to
understanding biology and disease, including human cancer.
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March 26, 2006.
Dr. Steven Benner engaged in the "Great Debate: Does life exist in the
cosmos in a form different from the life we know on Earth?" at the 2006
Astrobiology National Meeting in Washington, DC on March 29. Details...
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March 1, 2006.
The FfAME announces a new grant from the NIH to develop
more efficient combinatorial libraries in collaboration
with DNA 2.0.
• December 9-11, 2005.
The Emory University Conference Center recently hosted
a symposium "Pioneering Research for 50 Years", for former
Benner coworkers in Atlanta on December 9-11, 2005 to
highlight a half century of pioneering research.
• February 20, 2005.
FfAME scientists, as part of the Foundation's outrearch
program, presented a seminar at the Florida Museum of
Natural History on the origin on life and the chemistry
that might support metabolism in alien life.
