Nick Lane

In the early 1990s Lane, as a doctoral student, studied mitochondrial function during ischemia-reperfusion injury in rabbit kidneys.⁠[1]

UCL Discovery holds his PhD thesis, In vivo studies of ischaemia-reperfusion injury in hypothermically-stored rabbit renal autografts, catalogued under 1996; it set out to clarify the mechanisms of ischemia-reperfusion injury, a major cause of graft failure after kidney transplantation.⁠[2]

He recalls that after leaving graduate school he worked for four years as a writer at a medical education company while holding an honorary position at UCL, and decided to explore his thinking on mitochondrial evolution in a book.⁠[1]

He served as Strategic Director of Medi Cine, a London medical multimedia company, developing interactive approaches to medical education.⁠[3]

In 2002 his first book, Oxygen: The Molecule that Made the World, was published. Nature ran a review by Thomas Kirkwood on October 24 that year, noting that the first half examines oxygen’s role in the evolution of life and the second half oxidative stress and ageing.⁠[4]

In 2005 he published Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life. A July 2005 review in the Journal of Clinical Investigation said the book traces three billion years of the organelle in seven sections and champions the “hydrogen hypothesis” for the origin of eukaryotes.⁠[5]

In 2009 he received the UCL Provost’s Venture Research Prize.⁠[3]

He has said the fellowship provided him with three years of salary.⁠[1]

In October 2010 he and William Martin of the University of Dusseldorf published a study in Nature arguing that mitochondria were essential to the evolution of complex eukaryotic life: measured by energy available per gene, an average eukaryotic cell can support about 200,000 times more genes than bacteria.⁠[6]

Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution, published by Profile Books, tells the history of life on Earth through ten great inventions of evolution; on October 21, 2010, it won the Royal Society Prize for Science Books, with the £10,000 prize presented by Royal Society President Martin ReesMartin ReesMartin Rees (Lord Rees of Ludlow) is a British cosmologist and astrophysicist who has been Astronomer Royal since 1995; he has served as Plumian Professor of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge, Master of Trinity College and President of the Royal Society, and co-founded the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk.Open the full entry.⁠[7]

In April 2015 UCL featured his new book The Vital Question, which explores the link between energy and the origin of life.⁠[8]

The book asks why single-celled organisms such as bacteria kept the same basic form for some two and a half billion years, why complex life arose only once in four billion years, and why all complex life shares features such as sex that are unknown in bacteria.⁠[9]

That year he received the Biochemical Society Award for his outstanding contribution to the molecular biosciences.⁠[10]

On July 19, 2016, UCL announced that the Royal Society had awarded Lane the Michael Faraday Prize for his excellent work in science communication; as part of the prize he was to deliver the Royal Society’s Faraday lecture early the following year.⁠[11]

Named after Michael Faraday, the prize recognizes excellence in communicating science to UK audiences and was first awarded in 1986.⁠[12]

In November 2019 a UCL team led by Lane published a study in Nature Ecology & Evolution that created protocells in hot, alkaline seawater from a mixture of fatty acids and fatty alcohols, adding evidence that life may have originated at deep-sea hydrothermal vents rather than in shallow pools.⁠[13]

On April 6, 2022, as the Robert S. Morris Class of 1976 Visiting Fellow, he lectured at Hamilton College in the United States on “Energy and Matter at the Origin of Life,” setting out the hypothesis that life began at alkaline hydrothermal vents.⁠[14]

In 2022 he published Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death; the 400-page U.S. edition from Norton centers on the Krebs cycle and argues for shifting biology’s focus from information to energy.⁠[15]

The U.S. edition was released on July 12, 2022, and a review called it an enthusiastic, up-to-date overview of the biochemistry of life.⁠[16]

He appeared on episode 318 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, whose description calls him a biochemist at UCL and author of Transformer, The Vital Question and other books; topics included the origin of life, panspermia, what life is, photosynthesis, prokaryotic versus eukaryotic cells, sex, DNA, human evolution, Neanderthals, consciousness, and AI and biology.⁠[17]

In October 2022 he and colleagues published a study in PLOS Biology concluding that the two-carbon compound acetyl phosphate is the most plausible precursor to ATP as a biological phosphorylator and that ATP’s role as the cell’s universal energy currency was not a “frozen accident.”⁠[18]

In November 2024 he gave an online talk to MIT, Caltech and others titled “What Is A Feeling? A Bioenergetic Perspective.”⁠[19]

In autumn 2025, as a Gifford Lectures guest speaker at the University of Edinburgh, he spoke on “Why is Life the Way it Is?” and took part in a seminar co-hosted with the Royal Society of Edinburgh. By then he was Director of UCL’s Centre for Life’s Origins and Evolution (CLOE), had published more than 130 papers, and his books had been translated into 30 languages.⁠[20]

Lane is Professor of Evolutionary Biochemistry in UCL’s Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment and a founding member of the UCL Consortium for Mitochondrial Research.⁠[21]

He lives in London with his wife, Dr. Ana Hidalgo-Simon, and their two sons; in his spare time he climbs and plays the fiddle.⁠[3]

Personal website: Public link: https://nick-lane.net/ (opens in a new window)⁠[17]

University College London: Official website: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ (opens in a new window)⁠[21]