Questions of origins, among others, are deeply embedded in everything we do. Landing at Narita airport this spring to start work at ELSI, I was really surprised to find myself back in Japan after 22 years. How had I ended up here?

Many years ago, while in college and having some trouble studying and making rent and paying tuition (which was in retrospect, compared to the going rate in America today, very inexpensive), I bought a one way ticket to Japan to try to teach English, save up some money, and then come back and finish my bachelor's degree. A simple plan, on paper. Of course, not having a job, a place to stay or speaking Japanese would make my simple plan "delightfully challenging", but what 20 year old doesn't like a challenge?

I ended up teaching at a small school in Tokyo, which taught English through drama. The idea was one would act out little plays for the students - mine were mostly small children, so the plays were pretty basic, more like short monologues, really, and the idea was the children would connect the words with the actions, and then bingo, everyone would learn English. Sounds simple, right? But by the tenth or twentieth iteration of the story of the Three Little Pigs, while my interpretation of the "big bad wolf" had become very frightening, if I may say so myself (and I think my performances made a few small children cry on occasion. I mean this wolf was scary, he could blow your entire house down, and no, not with a giant fan, not with explosives, but merely with his lungs, and once your house is gone, well my little pig-buddy, I feel pretty sorry for you, if you can grasp the complete existential terror of that concept...), and each of the pigs was an equally richly developed character, it was becoming clear to me that this was not my final destination in life. By a very roundabout path which led from Japan to Korea to China to Hong Kong to Taiwan, back to Japan, on to Seattle, by thumb to Alaska (my oh my Canada is large, and the Yukon sparsely populated (by people, at least, by bears...at times it seemed somewhat less so...), through thousands of pounds of mushrooms (the wild gourmet type, to be sure), and finally back to university, now finally with wads of gourmet mushroom cash in hand. This of course transformed itself into rather thick and expensive text books almost immediately.

After having pleasantly whiled away so much time in the woods of Alaska, I decided I wanted to be an ecology major. But slowly it dawned on me that to truly understand ecology, one needed to understand individual organisms, so I became an organismal biology major. But then it seemed that to truly understand organisms, one needed to understand molecular biology and biochemistry, so I became a molecular biologist (I had this image in my head of molecules themselves being alive, which sounded like a really exciting idea. I was somewhat disappointed to learn that the term "molecular biology" really only referred to one particular molecule!). But then it seemed to really understand molecular biology one needed to understand organic chemistry, so I became a...not so fast. I did not become an organic chemistry major. I wanted to graduate at some point, after all!

I found a job after college working in a lab at UCSF studying motor proteins, which are amazingly complex molecular machines. It is absolutely fascinating to ponder the cascade of precisely coordinated events that has to occur every time even the tiniest muscle twitches, and you really can reduce that down to simpler and simpler systems until you arrive at a very few molecular-scale events which are responsible for all of the action. Still, these structures and their interactions are so finely tuned and intricate, while one can try to understand how they work, all of this begs the question of how could this incredible complexity ever have come to be in the first place.

These were the kinds of things I was thinking about when I went over to the UCSF library to make some photocopies for work one day. While looking for the particular book I needed, out of the corner of my eye I caught view of a glossy green scientific journal someone had left lying on a table: the Journal of Molecular Evolution. Ah, OK! Even if molecules could not themselves be alive, they could evolve! Now we were getting somewhere. I scanned the table of contents and saw that the very first article had the intriguing title, "How long did it take for life to begin and evolve to cyanobacteria?" by Stanley Miller and Antonio Lazcano. Sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, I was drawn deeper into the mysteries of life's origin and early evolution. Could they ever be known? Was it "scientific" to ponder such things? What sort of audacious people would even dare try? (Spoiler alert, my short answers: yes, yes and all sorts from every corner of the globe. If you can, you should come to the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life (ISSOL) meeting in Nara, Japan, in July 2014 to meet them. It's going to be a great conference!).

I'll skip a large amount of detail here, this is a blog post after all, but not too long after reading that article in the library, I was in San Diego working towards a Ph.D. in Professor Stanley Miller's laboratory, trying to understand how organic compounds could have formed in the early solar system and how these could have become assembled into living systems. I've been working in the field ever since, and last year when I heard there was a new research institute starting up at Tokyo Tech dedicated to working on the problems of the origin of the Earth and the origin of Life, I jumped at the opportunity. ELSI is new, and it's still getting its sea legs, but that's part of what makes it so dynamic and exciting. The people are great: friendly and helpful, brilliant minds with a can-do spirit. While the paint is still drying on the walls of the new labs, everyone is already planning for the next stages of ELSI's growth and development.

So that's my ELSI origins story up until now. I'm curious to see how the rest of it turns out.

For more information on Jim (Henderson) Cleaves, please visit his ELSI personal page.