Like many young children, Sijbren Otto was fascinated by the history of life and wanted to dig up dinosaurs when he grew up. But life doesn’t always go to plan, and he ended up becoming not a palaeontologist in the field, but a chemist in the lab. Still, maybe that wasn’t such a departure from his childhood dream. Thanks to a surprise discovery, his work would take him closer than any fossil ever could to the heart of one of the most profound questions about life on Earth.
In 2010, Otto stumbled upon some of the first synthetic molecules that…
