UNTITLED ON ORIGINS OF LIFE

Internationally known astrophysicist and bestselling author Mario Livio and Jack Szostak, a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard University, plan to tell the amazing tale of the current scientific endeavors to find life elsewhere, and to decipher life here on earth.

They follow two very different paths on this exciting journey - one in the laboratory as Szostak has been running a research program at Harvard that seeks to build life from the ground up since 2000, while Livio has long been working with the Hubble telescope observing planets in the solar system and around distant stars to seek life elsewhere. However, they believe these two paths are not only intimately connected and inextricably intertwined, but that they lead to the same destination and are two sides of the same question - understanding what life really is - and in some sense, a search for who we are.

Both of their research areas promise major new discoveries over the next several years, and the book will be based on their own respective efforts as well as those of others publishing in the fields, told both through typical explication of the science - what it means, and why it matters - as well as interviews with the major players, to uncover the epistemological and emotional lives of the people doing the work: why does it matter to them, and so to others?

Mario Livio is an internationally known astrophysicist, a bestselling author, and a popular speaker who has appeared on The Daily Show, 60 Minutes, and NOVA. For twenty-four years he was at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which operates the Hubble Space Telescope. He is the author of the bestsellers The Golden Ratio, Brilliant Blunders, and Galileo, among other books. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

Jack Szostak is a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard University, and Alexander Rich Distinguished Investigator at Massachusetts General Hospital. His work was integral the Human Genome Project, and he jointly won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for work on the structure of chromosomes, along with Elizabeth Blackburn and Carol Greider, and has won man other prizes including the Lasker and the HP Heineken Prize. Currently his lab focuses on the origin of life on Earth as well as the construction of artificial cellular life. This is his first trade book.