A new search for the origin of life

The Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI) at the Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) has been awarded US$5.6 million by the John Templeton Foundation to create a global scientific network, the ELSI Origins Network (EON), to advance our understanding of where, when and how life arose on Earth.

The John Templeton Foundation serves as a philanthropic catalyst for discoveries relating to the big questions of human purpose and ultimate reality. The ELSI was thus well suited to receive a grant from the foundation, with a mission to elucidate how the Earth was formed and how its early environment allowed for the rise of initial life and its subsequent evolution.

“ELSI at Tokyo Tech is an institution that is uniquely devoted to origin-of-life studies, considering the environments on the early Earth, and we have learned that progress on this problem requires collaboration with many researchers from various disciplines around the world,” noted ELSI Director Kei Hirose.

“This generous support for EON from the John Templeton Foundation enables us to form a larger global and interdisciplinary network with ELSI as a hub, and furthers our goals of understanding the origin of life from an interdisciplinary perspective.”

At its inception, EON will tackle three overarching questions:

• How did life emerge on Earth?
• How common is life in the universe?
• Are there notions of cause, chance and necessity that unify life science and the physical sciences into a larger coherent framework for understanding nature?

As part of its goal to support a new generation of scientists, the EON will fund up to 10 postdoctoral researchers who will spend half of their time in Japan and the other half abroad. It will also provide seed funding for collaborations between scientists in different countries; funding and facilities for scientists and students to visit Japan; and a dynamic program of scientific workshops and public outreach.

“One of our key goals is to unify the international origins-of-life community by seeding and nurturing research, training scientists and providing a stimulating and exciting meeting place,” said Eon Director Piet Hut. “ELSI at Tokyo Tech is perfectly situated for this, as one of Japan’s visionary World Premier International institutes, with a vigorous and talented staff already engaged in cutting-edge research, in an environment that fully supports the scientists’ needs.”

“Our founder, the late Sir John Templeton, was interested in big questions about the nature and origins of life to understand where we come from and our place in the vast cosmos,” added Ayako Fukui, assistant director for strategic program initiatives at the John Templeton Foundation. “We believe that ELSI is well positioned to carry out this ambitious initiative, especially with support from the Japanese government and collaborators around the world and across disciplines.”

By bringing together existing ideas from different sciences to shape each other’s development, the John Templeton Foundation’s support will help the EON to create a collaborative research community with global vision. Fukui said, “Our hope is that EON’s strategic interdisciplinary efforts to codify the field will provide a much-needed framework for origins-of-life research.”

The initial EON project will run for 33 months.