A short history & future of MOL
Three months ago, many of us attended the conference Re-Conceptualizing the Origin of Life at Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, DC. This meeting was the culmination of a grass roots movement called MOL, short for Modeling Origins of Life, which started a couple years earlier with a white paper, based on the first few MOL workshops. It is our hope that the enthusiasm generated in the conference will continue, and lead to vigorous discussions here on the EON web site. I want to thank Nathaniel Virgo for setting up the web site, and Sara Walker not only for chairing the Scientific Organizing Committee for the conference, but also for taking the lead in getting our discussions here started.
Our main goal, beyond the discussions here in cyber space, is to organize “working workshops” of the kind that we held in early 2014 at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (photo below), and in the summer of 2014 in Japan, where we got together with a couple dozen people at ELSI in Tokyo at first, and then later continued in Kobe at the Center for Planetary Science, for a total of five weeks. In addition, if anyone likes to organize local meetings or gettogethers of any kind, please go ahead, and make sure to announce them here.
