Jack Szostak started his first lab as a “freshly minted assistant professor” working in DNA recombination and repair reactions. While researchers had known for years that the broken ends of DNA strands behaved differently from broken DNA in the middle of the strand, they did not know the details. Because cells do not like broken ends, “they’ll do lots of things to repair that broken DNA.”
“[The origins of life] is an unusual kind of science because we can’t go back and watch what happened. I don’t think we can ever be sure of exactly how life got started on our planet." — Jack Szostak


From MIT World

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