Frances Westall

Biography

Frances Westall was born in Johannesburg. After spending her childhood in the UK, she studied geology at Edinburgh University in Scotland and in Cape Town, South Africa. She was successively a post-doctoral researcher in marine geology at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, a researcher in geobiology at the Universities of Nantes and Bologna, and a researcher at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (NASA) and the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston. In 2002, she became head of the CNRS exobiology group in Orléans. She headed the French Exobiology Society from 2006 to 2008 and is currently President of the European Astrobiology Network Association (EANA). A specialist in ancient traces of life on Earth, she is heavily involved in Mars missions (Mars Science Laboratory with the Curiosity robot, ExoMars 2018 and Mars 2020). She is currently Research Director at the Centre de Biophysique Moléculaire d’Orléans (CNRS).

Conference: What is the origin of life?

How did life originate, on Earth or elsewhere? Did life on Earth arrive from another planet via panspermia? Is there life elsewhere in the universe? Even if terrestrial life is originally an extraterrestrial phenomenon – which scientists working in the field don’t believe it is – it has appeared somewhere and somehow. But how? Most hypotheses on the origin of life advocate processes leading naturally from prebiotic chemistry to biology. If this is the case – and several laboratories are working hard to produce proto-cells – it may be that life (based fundamentally on water and carbon molecules) is indeed widespread in the universe, at least on rocky planets, which are not rare. But what kind of life? Intelligent or technologically adept life like *Homo sapiens sapiens* or simpler life like bacteria? The origin of life, its distribution in the universe and its destiny are among the fundamental questions for us, and the answers present great challenges for science.