Lee Cronin

Cronin was born in Ipswich into a working-class family and struggled at school; he says a very good chemistry teacher he had at 17 set him on the path to chemistry, and he was also drawn to technology, building his first computer as a child.⁠[1]

His group biography says he got his first computer and chemistry set at age 8, when he began thinking about programming chemistry and looking for inorganic aliens; he earned both a degree and a PhD in chemistry at the University of York, then did postdoctoral work in Edinburgh and Germany.⁠[2]

After holding positions at the Universities of Edinburgh, Bielefeld and Birmingham, he joined the University of Glasgow in 2002.⁠[3]

In July 2011 he spoke at TEDGlobal 2011 with “Making matter come alive,” describing attempts to build a fully inorganic cell from a carbon-free “Lego kit” of inorganic molecules that can assemble, replicate and compete.⁠[4]

In an August 2011 interview, as Gardiner Professor of Chemistry at Glasgow, he described inorganic biology as asking whether biology can exist outside organic chemistry and said his lab was trying to make inorganic cells replicate and evolve.⁠[5]

He won the Royal Society of Chemistry’s 2012 Corday-Morgan Prize, awarded annually since 1949 to outstanding chemists under 40, becoming the first Glasgow chemist to win it in 35 years; the citation recognized his work on the self-assembly of inorganic molecules and complex systems.⁠[6]

On May 25, 2012, he gave the 81st Joseph Henry Lecture at the Philosophical Society of Washington, titled “Synthesizing Life,” on efforts to build inorganic chemical systems capable of Darwinian evolution beyond organic biology, and was made a member of the society.⁠[7]

At TED Global 2012 he gave a short talk on his group’s use of 3D printing in chemistry, asking whether a universal chemistry set could be built and chemistry distributed like an app.⁠[8]

In July 2012 he led a 45-person team in Glasgow; they adapted a 3D printer of about £1,200 into a prototype that printed precisely sized reaction chambers from bathroom sealant and then injected reagents for multistep reactions, and he hoped drugs could one day be made from downloaded recipes.⁠[9]

In June 2013 he was appointed to the University of Glasgow’s Regius Chair of Chemistry, founded by King George III in 1817 and one of the university’s 13 Regius professorships; the royal warrant confirming the appointment was signed by the Queen and First Minister Alex Salmond.⁠[10]

In April 2014 he was one of 10 RISE Leaders named by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC); the university described his work as spanning inorganic fuels for water splitting, configurable robotics for programming drug and materials discovery, and the aim of creating life from self-replicating, evolving inorganic chemical cells (iCHELLs).⁠[11]

In May 2015 the Royal Society of Chemistry announced that he had won a 2015 Tilden Prize worth £5,000; the university said he had invented the reactionware concept of 3D-printed reaction vessels in 2011 and that his lab had more than 50 members and over £25 million in research funding.⁠[12]

His group said the prize recognized his work on the synthesis, self-assembly, electronic structure and nanotechnology device applications of polyoxometalate architectures.⁠[13]

In 2016 he and Sara Imari Walker of Arizona State University published the perspective “Beyond prebiotic chemistry” in Science, volume 352.⁠[14]

They argued for looking beyond the biochemistry of known life to the information and processes that give rise to complex systems, proposing complexity-first models to understand what makes a system alive.⁠[15]

For the 200th anniversary of the Regius Chair of Chemistry he hosted an invitation-only symposium in the School of Chemistry on September 25–26; the chair’s first holder, Thomas Thomson, was appointed in 1818, and Cronin is its 12th occupant.⁠[16]

He received the 2018 Inorganic Chemistry Lectureship from the journal Inorganic Chemistry and the ACS Division of Inorganic Chemistry for his group’s polyoxometalate work using robotics and AI, with a session in his honour at the ACS Fall National Meeting in Boston that August.⁠[17]

In October 2018 he said that if a hard Brexit kept him from running a world-leading team in the UK, many researchers would be forced to move their work abroad or take joint EU affiliations; at the time 20 of his 57 researchers were European and 19 came from the rest of the world.⁠[18]

In December 2018 his team unveiled the Chemputer, an organic-chemistry automation system with programming languages, which made three drugs including Viagra and Nytol without human intervention.⁠[19]

The system’s yields for Nytol, rufinamide and sildenafil in the Science paper matched or beat manual synthesis, and its code that transfers between platforms unchanged to improve reproducibility.⁠[20]

He founded Chemify in 2019 with backing from Abcam co-founder David Cleevely and serves as its CEO; the company formally spun out of the University of Glasgow in March 2022.⁠[21]

In 2020 the group published in Science a universal language for programming the Chemputer: chemists translate literature syntheses into the chemical code XDL, check it, and the robots then make the compound with no manual steps.⁠[22]

Cronin and Walker began collaborating after a 2012 NASANASAThe National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is the U.S. federal agency responsible for the civilian space program, aeronautics research and space science. Established by law in 1958 and headquartered in Washington, D.C., it has run programs including Mercury, the Apollo Moon landings, the Space Shuttle, the International Space Station and Artemis.Open the full entry astrobiology workshop; in 2021 a team they led proposed a general way to identify molecules made by living systems from their chemical complexity, even for unfamiliar chemistries.⁠[23]

The Nature Communications paper used assembly theory to quantify molecular complexity and measured it experimentally through mass-spectrometry fragmentation, as a life-detection approach that assumes nothing about alien chemistry.⁠[24]

On January 24, 2022, his roughly 60-strong Digital Chemistry group became the first researchers to move into the University of Glasgow’s new £116 million Advanced Research Centre (ARC), working in one space for the first time.⁠[25]

He appeared as the guest of episode 269 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, discussing the origin of life, self-replicating molecules, alien life and the Fermi paradox, assembly theory, free will, cellular automata, chemputation and its safety, and consciousness.⁠[26]

He and Sara Walker appeared together on episode 279 for a conversation and debate about alien life and civilizations, covering what life is, assembly theory, communication with aliens, creating alien life, the origin of life, time and free will.⁠[27]

In August 2023 Chemify announced more than £33 million in funding led by US-based Triatomic Capital, with the UK government’s Innovation Accelerators programme participating; he said his ambition was to build a $10 billion company over time, headquartered in Scotland.⁠[28]

The Series A totalled $43 million, with new investors including Horizon Ventures, Rocketship Ventures, Possible Ventures, Alix Ventures and Eos alongside existing investor BlueYard Capital.⁠[29]

On October 4, 2023, Sharma, Walker, Cronin and colleagues published “Assembly theory explains and quantifies selection and evolution” in Nature, defining assembly as a function of the copy number of observed objects and their assembly indices, the number of steps on a minimal path producing them.⁠[30]

The paper quickly drew criticism for how it was written and how its ideas were presented; Cronin said the theory provides a molecular mechanism by which the emergence of life can be explained by chemistry.⁠[31]

Commentator Philip Ball wrote that the paper set off vigorous debate on social media and in the comments on Nature’s website, with some evolutionary biologists denouncing it as nonsense and even a Trojan horse for creationism.⁠[32]

On episode 404 he discussed the Nature assembly-theory paper, the assembly equation, discovering alien life, his response to criticism, Kolmogorov complexity, Nature’s review process, artificial general intelligence and nuclear weapons.⁠[33]

On June 20, 2025, Chemify opened its first Chemifarm in Maryhill, Glasgow, a 21,500 sq ft, £12 million site combining AI molecular design with industrial-scale robotic synthesis; the company then had about 130 staff, and its partnerships included a Gates Foundation-supported effort to find drug leads for tuberculosis and malaria.⁠[34]

In October 2025 Chemify announced an oversubscribed Series B of more than $50 million, co-led by Wing Venture Capital and Insight Partners, and planned a Silicon Valley facility led by chief technical officer Mike Bell.⁠[35]

His public biography lists four aims: building an artificial life form, digitizing chemistry, using AI in chemistry including wet chemical computers, and exploring complexity and information in chemistry; his team designs its own robots and runs 25 robotic systems using XDL.⁠[36]

The University of Glasgow’s publication list shows that in 2026 he and coauthors published “Chemputer and chemputation: a universal chemical compound synthesis machine” in PNAS, along with several assembly-theory papers.⁠[37]

Personal website: Public link: https://www.chem.gla.ac.uk/cronin/ (opens in a new window)⁠[26]

X: Public account: https://x.com/leecronin (opens in a new window)⁠[26]

University of Glasgow: Official website: https://www.gla.ac.uk/ (opens in a new window)⁠[37]

Chemify: Official website: https://chemify.io (opens in a new window)⁠[26]