P. López-García

Biography

By studying microbial diversity and evolution, Purificación López-García strives to enrich our knowledge of the evolution of life on Earth. After a spell at the University of Alicante in Spain, she joined the Ecology, Systematics and Evolution laboratory at Orsay as a research fellow in 2002. Combining high-throughput molecular approaches and the exploration of often extreme environments (deep oceans, alkaline lakes, deserts, oxygen-deprived ecosystems, etc.), her research has led to the discovery of new lineages of micro-organisms, both prokaryotic and eukaryotic. Promoted to research director in 2007, Purificación is also an associate member of Belgium’s Royal Academy of Sciences and Arts. In 2012, she was awarded an ERC Advanced Grant for the ProtistWorld project on the evolution of eukaryotic microorganisms in oxygen-poor environments. In 2016, she and her team explored the Dallol hydrothermal site in Ethiopia, in search of the limits of life in one of the most inhospitable environments on the planet.

Conference: Can we decipher the origin of life?

Long inaccessible to scientific study, the question of the origin of life was historically monopolized by the various religions, which proposed answers based on faith. Scientific study, i.e. the search for natural causes, of the origin of life only really began in the mid-19th century. At that time, Louis Pasteur refuted the idea of spontaneous generation (that life can appear at any moment) and Charles Darwin published his revolutionary work The Origin of Species, in which he proposed an original mechanism, natural selection, to explain the transformation of species. Following his reasoning to its ultimate conclusions, if all species result from the transformation of previous species, they must ultimately descend from an ultimate species… At the same time, advances in biochemistry, with the first laboratory syntheses of organic compounds, opened the door to the first scientific scenarios on the origin of life. The twentieth century saw immense scientific advances, from the development of molecular biology to the exploration of the universe in space and chemistry. At the dawn of the 21st century, what do we know about the origin of life? We can now place the non-living/living transition in a realistic context and propose increasingly refined hypotheses.