Chemputers, Non-Carbon Based Life, and the Future of Chemistry

Policy Punchline

Lee Cronin is a chemist and the Regius Chair of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow. He has been elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Royal Society of Chemistry, and has published over 350 papers and given hundreds of lectures. He also heads the Cronin Group, a lab that is “motivated by the fascination for complex chemical systems, and the desire to construct complex functional molecular architectures that are not based on biologically derived building blocks.” He and his team are trying to make artificial life forms, find alien life, explore the digitization of chemistry, understand how information can be encoded into chemicals and construct chemical computers, and create complex molecular architecture not necessarily based on biological building blocks. We start by discussing non-carbon-based lifeforms. Dr. Cronin’s interest in this subject comes from an aversion to assuming that carbon is the only life-permitting foundational molecule. He has created inorganic chemical cells that act in much the same way as our cells – in essence they are self-replicating and evolving. This leads to discussion of implications and also nanotechnology, which is closely tied with chemical architecture. Nanotechnology can be split into two categories, according to Dr. Cronin: the biological engineering type, and the materials science/chemist type that deals with molecules and materials at the smallest scale. This leads to questions about whether evolution could be utilized and harnessed for human use. Dr. Cronin also has an extensive background in education. A major project of Dr. Cronin’s are “chemputers.” Chemputers would be able to synthesize molecules after “reading” it off a paper, which naturally is a huge advancement for materials science and chemistry. We examine how this technology would scale up to practical use, and how it would be implemented in the real world. We also discuss the possible futures of chemistry education, and how labs will operate in a more automated future world, including the possible risk of very real and dangerous applications of this technology. Such advancements also have implications for academia, and academic research. Further, we explore a more theoretical side to chemistry such as how quantum computing might affect chemistry work. Finally, we discuss Dr. Cronin’s work in energy and battery technology, which ties back into the nanotechnology side of things as well. We hope you enjoy this interview with a very influential figure in the chemistry world.