First Venture Research Fellowship awarded to Dr Nick Lane

Press Release - Media coverage The first UCL Venture Research Fellowship has been awarded to Nick Lane, UCL Genetics, Evolution and Environment. There is a big hole at the very heart of biology, and it concerns the origin of all complex life on earth - why our planet erupted with life, and why humans turn out to be so closely related to mushrooms at the level of our cells, says Dr Lane. He will now seek to solve this mystery, with potentially groundbreaking implications for the ageing process and the origins of the species itself, as part of a UCL initiative to enable researchers to try to make some of the biggest scientific discoveries free of the constraints set by funding rules and peer review. The award will provide a Reader's salary for three years (about £150,000 in total) and will enable Lane to develop his research proposal, 'Chemiosmosis and the Foundations of Complex Life'. Lane will seek to answer such questions as why complex cells have evolved only once in four billion years, why they share many unexpected traits like sex and senescence, and ' if these traits offer a selective advantage ' why bacteria do not take advantage. According to current thinking, answers to these questions should arise from genetics, but a narrowly genetic perspective suggests that complex life should evolve repeatedly. All life depends on chemiosmosis ' the process by which all cells power themselves by an unexpected electrical mechanism ' for energy generation, and Lane will seek to uncover the broader implications of chemiosmosis for evolution.