Scientists at four of the world’s leading universities have teamed up to investigate the origins of life on Earth — and look for similar biological processes taking place elsewhere in the universe.
The universities of Cambridge in the UK, Harvard and Chicago in the US and ETH Zürich in Switzerland announced the formation of what they called the Origins Federation on Saturday at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Washington.
“I believe that life is embedded into the laws of physics of the universe,” said Didier Queloz, a leader of the initiative, who has dual appointments at Cambridge and ETH. He was a co-discoverer of the first known exoplanet — a planet orbiting a star other than our sun — in the 1990s.