Jack Szostak started his first lab as a “freshly minted assistant professor” working in DNA recombination and repair reactions. While researchers had known for years that the broken ends of DNA strands behaved differently from broken DNA in the middle of the strand, they did not know the details. Because cells do not like broken ends, “they’ll do lots of things to repair that broken DNA.” While attending a conference in New Hampshire in 1980, he met Elizabeth Blackburn who was working on an isolated piece of DNA that acted like a normal chromosomal end. They began collaborating on DNA that led to discovering the biochemistry of telomeres—those particular ends of DNA strands and predicting the existence of the enzyme, telomerase, which regulates them.  Through their work, medical applications have emerged with emphases in cancer and aging. Cancer cells are able to repair their broken DNA ends and can divide without limit; aging cells do not have enough of the enzyme telomerase to fix broken ends. They cannot replicate themselves, becoming shorter and shorter, then die. Knowing that many other researchers would carry on his work in telomeres, Szostak shifted his lab’s work over to experiments on naturally occurring ribozymes. He had become interested in the work that Tom Cech was doing in catalyzed chemical reactions, particularly in how catalytic RNA works and its applications in terms of the origins of life. When that work proved limited in scope, he “got interested in ribozymes that did things that we cared about.” His lab began creating RNAs that did new and different things. Work in the origins of life field, especially at the Harvard Origins of Life Initiative, involves asking many broad questions about the processes of planet formation, early and atmospheric chemistry, and how Darwinian evolution gets going. “Once you’ve got all the molecules you need, how do they get together and starting acting like a cell? How does Darwinian evolution emerge s...