Life from scratch
Relaunching biology from the beginning
A short stroll from Boston’s Charles River, behind a sheath of blue glass on the seventh floor of a Harvard Medical School research building, Jack Szostak is getting set to replay the greatest event on Earth.
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He and his 15-member team of graduate students and young postdoctoral research fellows are well on their way to starting biology from scratch — more than 3.5 billion years after it first emerged.