Artificial cell membrane, step toward synthetic life

Neal Devaraj, assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry at UC San Diego, and Itay Budin, a graduate student at Harvard University, have taken an important step in making artificial life forms from scratch. Using a novel chemical reaction, they have created self-assembling cell membranes, the structural envelopes that contain and support the reactions required for life.

“One of our long term, very ambitious goals is to try to make an artificial cell, a synthetic living unit from the bottom up – to make a living organism from non-living molecules that have never been through or touched a living organism,” Devaraj said. “Presumably this occurred at some point in the past. Otherwise life wouldn’t exist.”

Jim Arnold, Founding Chemist at UC San Diego Dies at 88

James R. Arnold, founding chairman of UC San Diego’s chemistry department and first director of the California Space Institute whose contributions to science spanned the study of cosmic rays to the future of manned space flight, died Friday, January 6. He was 88.

“Jim Arnold truly was a visionary scientist who found creative ways of looking at a broad range of problems, terrestrial and extraterrestrial,” said Mark Thiemens, Dean of the Division of Physical Sciences. 

A longtime consultant to NASA, Arnold helped to set science priorities for missions, including the Apollo flights to the moon. He first served on a NASA committee in 1959, just three months after the space agency was established.

Arnold was in Houston for the arrival of the first lunar samples and carried some of them back to his laboratory at UC San Diego where his group studied them, sometimes while watching astronauts on subsequent missions on television as they collected the rocks Arnold’s group would study next. 

“The excitement of it - to hold something that’s from the moon,” said Candace Kohl, a graduate student who pulverized the rock surfaces with a dental drill as part of her study. “You would have to collect the moon dust off your fingers.” More>>

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M. Salah Baouendi (1937-2011)

M. Salah Baouendi, Distinguished Professor in UC San Diego’s Department of Mathematics, a world renowned researcher and a model for leadership on the campus, died peacefully in his home on December 24, 2011. He was 74.  Salah was particularly passionate about mentoring young mathematicians.  Part of his legacy is a world-wide group of mathematicians working on questions that were inspired by Salah and his mathematics.

More about Salah and the scholarship that the Department of Mathematics is establishing in his name.

Two in physical sciences honored for efforts to increase diversity

Professor Robert Continetti, chairman of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and Dr. Christopher Smith, Director for Education, Outreach and Training for the Center for Theoretical Biological Physics, both recognized for their successful work to increase diversity and inclusion.