Life Built to Order

On a warm Saturday last June I gave Rasmussen a lift to Santa Fe in my rental car to meet up with his wife, Jenny, a German-born painter who often spends weekends at an outdoor market space in the state capital selling her abstract landscapes. As we drove past weather-sculpted rock outcroppings and dry arroyos dotted with pion and juniper, it struck me that New Mexico is a pretty good place to contemplate the origins of life. Staring out at the stark, rocky landscape, I began to imagine primitive, prebiological molecules dancing in some murky primordial puddle off the side of the road-until the neon glow of an Indian casino on the horizon broke the spell.


Rasmussen was apparently thinking similar thoughts, because as he looked out at the landscape rolling past he mused, â€All your experiences completely contradict the ability for us to be here. You see the mountains crumble, the landscape erode. If you don´t maintain your house, it falls apart. Your car has to go in for repair all the time.†He turned to face me. â€So how did we come about? What is it in nature that creates complexity? That has sort of been my driver.â€

Rasmussen grew up in Munkerup, a small coastal town that´s a 45-minute drive from Copenhagen. One of his earliest memories is dragging his father, a mason turned entrepreneur, out into the evening air so that he could scramble atop his shoulders and â€be closer to the stars.†There the future scientist and the former bricklayer debated cosmic questions: Was there an end to the universe? If so, what lay on the other side? Rasmussen was four years old.


Later, as a physics student in the late 1970s at the Technical University of Denmark, Rasmussen´s interest in life´s origins led him to the papers of Belgian physical chemist Ilya Prigogine and German biophysicist Manfred Eigen, Nobel laureates known for their pioneering work on self-organizing systems. Perched at the crossroads of physics, chemistry and biology, self-organization is a phenomenon visible everywhere, from the undulating grains of sand dunes to the synchronized gyrations of schools of fish. In each case, order and pattern arise seemingly spontaneously from chaos and randomness. Rasmussen became transfixed by these phenomena and how they might apply to inanimate organic molecules bobbing in the early oceans, molecules that somehow organized themselves into increasingly complex living systems-eventually resulting in us.


He began spending long hours in the computer lab modeling lifelike processes, much to the dismay of department elders. â€My physics professors said, â€These are computer games! What are you doing?´ †he recalls. They gave him an ultimatum: Keep fiddling with origins-of-life research, and you can forget about getting a job as a physicist. But by then Rasmussen was hooked. When it came time to choose a dissertation topic, he announced that he would tackle the problem of how and when genes arose. His advisers threw up their hands, but Rasmussen couldn´t stop thinking about these questions. (â€There is no â€off´ button,†his wife told me with a playful eye roll after we met up with her in Santa Fe.)


In 1987 Rasmussen was finishing a postdoc at the Technical University and feeling conflicted about whether to stay in science. Then a friend and colleague handed him a flier for a conference in the U.S. on a new interdisciplinary field called artificial life, or A-life. â€I read it three or four times,†Rasmussen says. â€Then I grabbed the telephone.â€

His call led to an invitation not only to attend the conference-which was held at Los Alamos-but to give a talk about the various computer simulations he had
created to predict when the first genes and other early biomolecules may have emerged. A year later he had landed
himself a full-time job at Los Alamos studying self-
organizing complex systems, which over the years has led him to investigate topics as seemingly far from the origins of life as urban sprawl and the dynamics of traffic jams.


Today Rasmussen´s office is a short walk from where that first A-life gathering took place. It was a watershed moment. Eighteen years ago, artificial life was fringe science; some of the people who traveled to that first meeting to discuss everything from life´s origins to how one could create lifelike robots, computer viruses and even biological entities kept their participation hidden from scientific colleagues. Today all that has changed, and now Rasmussen and other founding fathers find themselves tackling questions that are among the most cutting-edge in science. One day Rasmussen leads me across the campus to a small, bland building called the J. Robert Oppenheimer Study Center. Once inside, we climb the stairs to the second floor. â€This is it,†he says. It´s not much to look at-your basic carpeted ballroom with a podium in front. But for Rasmussen and a handful of other true believers, it might as well be the Vatican.




From the earliest days of A-life, people have contemplated its wider implications. In 1999 ethicist Mildred Cho of Stanford University headed a panel to weigh the risks of emerging efforts to create synthetic life-forms. The panel backed the research but cautioned that such an organism had the potential to â€wreak ecological havoc†or become the engine for a fearsome new biological weapon. Rasmussen agrees. â€Let´s be clear,†he says. â€There are clouds on the horizon. We don´t want to pollute either ourselves or our environment with renegade processes.†But, he thinks, in the end the technology may wind up being safer than the genetically altered crops being created today. His protocells would probably die if they strayed from the environment for which they were designed. Initially they´ll be lucky to survive even inside the carefully controlled conditions of the lab. â€Just shake the beaker,†he says, â€and they fall apart.â€

I ask him if he worries about a backlash from people who might condemn these efforts as overreaching, playing God. Rasmussen, who studied philosophy for three years before committing to physics, quickly dismisses the notion. â€I think there´s no contradiction whatsoever in being spiritual or religious and the work we´re doing,†he says. â€We´re peeling the onion, taking layer by layer off and figuring out how the world is put together. We´re just puny humans that are trying to understand.â€