ASB committee member and UCL biologist Nick Lane caught the attention of Bill Gates recently when the Microsoft founder came across his book “The Vital Question”. In a blog post about the book, Gates writes that Nick is “…one of those original thinkers who makes you say: More people should know about this guy’s work“. He concludes that the book’s focus on the importance of the role of energy in biology “will be seen as an important contribution to our understanding of where we come from, and where are we going”.
The full review can be found here: https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/The-Vital-Question
Bill Gates is not a biochemist, but Nick Lane is. When Bill Gates supports Nick Lane, it is therefore based on the assumption that Nick Lane has checked all his assertions thoroughly. But he could not have done that, because in that case he would have seen that there are several direct faults in his argumentation. I am especially thinking of his argumentation that eukaryotes need more energy than bacteria because they have more genes, and that the solution was to use more membrane area. Nick Lane has presented this assertion earlier in several articles. Based on the article “Life: Inevitable or fluke?” in New Scientist 23. June 2012 I have shown that there are many reasons this assertion does not hold. Just follow the link, it will lead you to my blog containing the arguments. They are based on biology, but they are also based a lot on information technology, which is Bill Gate’s profession.
Nick Lane’s assertion has also been criticized by Lynch, M. and Marinov, G.K. In “The bioenergetic costs of a gene” in Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. (USA) published online Nov. 2, 2105 they have come to the same conclusion.