So here's some inorganic life.

This is an inorganic tube.

We have arsenic coming through feather meal.

If we take this one, arsenic trioxide, arsenic trioxide's probably the most famous homicidal poison in history and it was in every home.

So we did find that Corexit 9500 contains heavy metals, arsenic and chromium arsenic at high enough levels to have cancer causing effects.

And as an inorganic chemist, my friends and colleagues make this distinction between the organic, living world and the inorganic, dead world.

And they wrote Shopaholic Adulteress Swallows Arsenic After Credit Fraud.

And what I'm going to try and do is plant some ideas about how we can transform inorganic, dead matter into living matter, into inorganic biology.

But then, when the feathers are recovered, the arsenic, now in its highly toxic inorganic form, class one carcinogen, is fed back into the food system, and bioaccumulates in the very birds that have shed those feathers, the next generation.

In the center of this graphic is the arsenic that gets recycled.

Chemical composition with an organized structure of a natural inorganic origin. gt gt Narrator

So using evolution in biology, and in inorganic biology, for me is quite appealing, quite exciting.

So what we're going to try and do is come up with an inorganic Lego kit of molecules.

In my own laboratory, the way we're trying to create inorganic life is by using many different reaction formats.

And I think, if we can make inorganic biology, and we can make matter become evolvable, that will in fact define life.

And then we give it a second gene to grow an inorganic material that can be used to split water into oxygen and hydrogen, that can be used for clean fuels.

But as this cartoon shows you of the first test for arsenic, these were very primitive tests, so, that our heroes really have to figure this out as they go in the 1920s.

Now, as I was training in clinical medicine and hematology and oncology and stem cell transplantation, what we had instead, cascading through the regulatory network at the FDA, were these substances arsenic, thalidomide, and this chemical derivative of nitrogen mustard gas.

If we accept the theory of evolution, then the first dawn of synthesis of life must consist in the production of forms intermediate between the inorganic and the organic world, or between the non living and living world, forms which possess only some of the rudimentary attributes of life

If you had early signs of paralysis and you were really good at asking personal questions, you might figure out that this paralysis someone has is from syphilis, in which case you could give this nice concoction of mercury and arsenic as long as you didn't overdose them and kill them.