Part 4/13:
A significant portion of the interview revolves around Dr. Tour's views on the origin of life—a topic he describes as still profoundly mysterious within the scientific community. He emphasizes that despite centuries of research, scientists lack a concrete understanding of how life began.
Tour points out the immense difficulties faced in synthesizing basic biological building blocks such as amino acids, lipids, sugars, and nucleic acids. These fundamental components, he notes, are exceedingly hard to produce and assemble correctly in laboratory conditions. He explained that even reconstructing an entire cell from its parts remains an unattainable goal, underscoring how far science still is from recreating life artificially.