Opening Address

Day 2

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Evolution for Chemical Innovation

The most powerful design process ever invented is evolution: it generates incomparable functionality and works at all scales, from molecules to entire ecosystems. There is nothing comparable in the world of human engineering. Humans have used evolution for biological design for thousands of years, choosing who mates with whom and who goes on to parent the next generation. Now, with recombinant DNA technology, we can use evolution to explore the future of chemistry. The catalysts of life, enzymes, are responsible for all the beautiful chemistry of the biological world. In this talk, I will describe how we can direct enzyme evolution to solve challenging chemical problems once thought to be out of reach of biology. Perhaps one day our chemicals industry will be based on DNA-encoded chemistry that uses renewable resources and recycles materials, just as Nature does.

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CRISPR-Cas: the power of microbiology for a transformative genomic engineering technology

(c) Hallbauer & Fioretti

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Exploring Molecular Signatures of Life

How to go from simple molecules to form a molecular system that shows life-like properties is one of the great mysteries of modern science. Among the essential features of living systems is the unique handedness of its essential molecules which implicates mirror symmetry breaking at the molecular level. This allows precise assembly and information transfer but also the ability to construct molecular motors allowing to get controlled motion. In this lecture I will discuss how to explore these molecular signatures of life in the lab and the progress towards artificial molecular machines and the smart materials of the future.

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Spaceflight: past, current and future

After sharing the experience of going to space and what is done on the International Space Station today, I´ll discuss the many benefits of spaceflight. Both from the thousands of satellites around Earth, providing a tremendously important infrastructure for better life on Earth, to future human space exploration to the Moon, Mars and even beyond. What are the possibilities, requirements, and challenges.

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Pain and suffering: the agony of not knowing

Science is often called a “knowledge based” business, but to me it’s founded on ignorance. So many things about the world are still mysterious, and it’s those mysteries that lead people to wonder and explore. I will start my talk with an example of my own ignorance, revealed by a curious bedtime question from a then 7-year old daughter: “Daddy, why is the ceiling opaque?” I suddenly realised—I’d been looking at Einstein’s 1905 paper—that I had no idea how light got through glass; specifically, how photons passed through windows. I asked a physicist friend if the photon that came out the other side was the same photon as the one that went in. “Tim” he told me “that is a meaningless question”. I gradually came to realise that simple questions do not necessarily have simple answers, but progress in science depends on questioning; but finding good questions is not a simple matter. During my life we’ve seen astonishing advances in understanding and amazing technological developments, all made possible by curious people doing experiments to find things out. It hurts, not knowing.

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Our Place in the Future: Lessons from a 3-million-year-old ancestor

Lucy, the 3.2 million-year-old skeleton found in Ethiopia’s Afar Triangle half a century ago, prompted a redrawing of the human family tree, placing her species, Australopithecus afarensis, as the last common ancestor to two evolutionary lineages, one that led to extinction and the other to, Homo sapiens. She reminds us of our ape ancestry and raises questions as to how her species survived for nearly a million years and what climatic changes may have prompted the later diversification of hominin species. She now serves as ambassador to our roots, and inspires a deeper understanding our place in nature and our responsibility as stewards of Planet Earth.

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Future Vaccines and therapeutics ; approaches to deliver mRNA and other macromolecules

Advanced drug delivery systems are having an enormous impact on human health. We start by discussing our early research on developing the first controlled release systems for macromolecules and the isolation of angiogenesis inhibitors and how these led to numerous new therapies. This early research then led to new drug delivery technologies including nanoparticles and nanotechnology that are now being studied for use treating cancer, other illnesses, and in vaccine delivery (including the Covid-19 vaccine). Approaches for synthesizing new biomaterials are then examined. Finally, by combining mammalian cells, including stem cells, with synthetic polymers, new approaches for engineering tissues are being developed that may help in treating various diseases. They also enable the creation of organs and tissues on a chip which may someday reduce animal and human testing.

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Steps toward Complex Matter: Chemistry !

The evolution of the universe has generated more and more complex forms of matter through self-organization, from particles up to living and thinking matter. Mankind has created science to unravel the ways and means by which matter has become organized up to a thinking organism in particular on our planet earth. Self-organization is the process by which steps towards life and thought have emerged. Animate as well as inanimate matter, living organisms as well as materials, are formed of molecules and of the organized entities resulting from the interaction of molecules with each other. Chemistry provides the bridge and unravels the steps from the molecules of inanimate matter and the highly complex molecular architectures and systems which make up living and thinking organisms. Molecular chemistry has developed very powerful methods for constructing ever more complex molecules from atoms. Supramolecular chemistry seeks to understand and control the formation and behaviour of complex molecular assemblies. The field of chemistry is the universe of all possible structures and transformations of molecular matter, of which those actually realized in nature represent just one world among all the worlds that await to be created. Conceptual considerations on science in general will be presented.

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Molecular Click Adventures – A Leap from the Shoulders of Giants

The concept of click chemistry matured simultaneously in different laboratories around the world in the 1990’s. There was an urgent need for quantitative chemical reactions to cope with the pressure from combinatorial science to synthesize, screen and identify millions of compounds. We serendipitously discovered the CuAAC click reaction in 2001. The mechanism of the reaction will be discussed, and its applications will be presented, as well as existential aspects of our fundamental understanding of chemistry and the importance of serendipity.

Opening Address

Day 1

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Planetary Boundaries: A tool to guide management of Human-Earth interactions

The climate and biodiversity witness that our societies cannot continue to flourish unless we actively manage our relationship with the Earth and its resources. Such management requires guardrails to identify how much perturbation of critical Earth system processes is “too much”. The planetary boundaries framework, first introduced in 2009, and since twice updated, identifies science-based limits for human perturbation of Earth system processes. The most recent update shows that 6 of 9 boundaries are transgressed and that transgression is increasing. It also shows, however, that human perturbation of the ozone layer – a boundary transgressed or nearly transgressed in the 1900s - is now in back within a “safe operating space”. The framework and how it can be used for management of the Human-Earth relationship are presented here.

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The Origin of Life: Not as Hard as it Looks?

The combined efforts of laboratories around the world have begun to converge on a reasonable pathway going all the way from planet formation to the beginnings of life itself. Many deeply embedded preconceptions have had to be overcome and discarded in order to enable progress. I will explain how overcoming these conceptual barriers has enabled fresh thinking into how the molecules of life were synthesized on the early Earth and then assembled into the first living cells. Once the ability of life to evolve in a Darwinian sense had become firmly established, life was free to adapt, diversify, and flourish, eventually giving rise to all the varieties of life we see around us today.

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Presymptomatic screening of apparently healthy individuals as an approach to human longevity

It is now 24 years since my team sequenced the first human genome and unfortunately other than improved DNA sequencing technology little has advanced our fundamental knowledge of how our genetic code determines our phenotypes, disease risk, behavior, and personalities. The practice of clinical medicine is based on resolving symptoms which is often too late or very expensive for long term survival. Due to over application of CT scanning techniques starting in the 1970’s which could not resolve tumors from cysts it became standard teaching in medicine that tests on asymptomatic individuals was unethical due to the expense and trouble of resolving “incidentalomas”. Ten years ago, I started a major program to determine comprehensive phenotypes along with detailed genome analysis on the same individuals. Advanced phenotypic screening involving new MRI algorithms, whole body quantitative MRI, comprehensive metabolite screening, and advanced cardiac testing coupled with human genomics has yielded clinically significant findings in about 50 percent of “healthy” asymptomatic individuals in over 7000 tested to date. This advancement relies upon accelerated discovery pipelines driven by the generation, integration, analysis, and interpretation of multimodal clinical and multi-omics data. For imaging analyses, we leverage newly developed highly sensitive ML/AI technologies for automated analysis and quantification of MRI scans. This includes fully automated segmentation of all major organs from whole-body scans, subregional segmentation of brain scans. Improved early detection of solid organ tumors, and quantification of tissue parameters, including liver and intramuscular fat. Incidentalomas have been essentially eliminated from our non-invasive testing. I will discuss the health and economic implications of our new approach.

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Molecular Precision for Betterment of Humanity

Since time immemorial humans relied on materials as tools to improve life and living conditions. As more skill in crafting materials was acquired, civilizations emerged and flourished. Today, there are ecosystems built around materials such as metal alloys, wood, glass, silicon, fabric, and petroleum, and they are the basis of the world's economy. However, it is unlikely that some of the most vexing problems facing humanity today can be solved by these materials alone. A new field of science termed reticular chemistry has enabled us to precisely design and make ultraporous materials with atomic precision, and potentially provide humanity with clean water, clean air and clean energy in a sustainable manner.

Symposium Co-Chair

Symposium Co-Chair

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