Our vision is to make Harvard the leader in origins of life research and education. Our initiative has the potential to pay broad dividends to all of the life sciences, Earth science and astronomy.

Our team approaches the evolutionary emergence of biochemistry as a phenomenon that can be understood as a planetary process in an astrophysical context. We are interested in what pathways exist to life emerging on planets, including ones like Earth. After all, central to the question of origin of life, is the question -- Is there life elsewhere?

The well-known conundrum of this emerging frontier is that we do not yet have a fundamental definition or understanding of life. Similarly, we do not understand life's origins -- how life emerges from chemistry. We do know that the chemistry of life on Earth is rather restrictive in its molecular permutations. Unnecessarily so, it seems, given the enormous choice of good options provided by chemistry for building bodies and function. However, we do not know whether nature or nurture is the reason. The biochemistry we see (and are!) could be universal, like gravity, where the same basic rules apply anywhere. Or our biochemistry could instead be one of many options, one that just happened to fit Earth's environmental conditions.

The question of alternative biochemistries, learning whether they are possible or not, now appears tractable, and though this does not directly answer the big questions of life's definition and origins; it represents a giant leap in the right direction. Of course, looking blindly for possible pathways to Earth's biochemistry or to alternative biochemistries would be a depressingly pointless endeavor, given the seemingly infinite possibilities. But if we assume that the emergence of life in general is a planetary phenomenon, then the possible geochemical environments within and outside our solar system are constrained by planetary science and astrophysics. These disciplines allow us to estimate both the initial conditions on early Earth -- for the pathway to Earth's biochemistry -- as well as conditions in other planetary systems -- for any alternative biochemistries.

Our team's research is to work in both directions simultaneously: from within - following paths that begin with Earth's biochemistry and move away from its set of molecules and networks in search for alternatives, and from outside - following paths from plausible initial conditions.