One could say you can't do any experiment which exceeds the lifetime of a PhD student. But that was our surprise... if you choose the right conditions you can do it. You can do it even in days or weeks... days and hours, depending on what you are... you are never trying to evolve any living creature. What you try is you ask very special questions, which are key points in evolution, and those experiments can be easily done.
[Q] Who was the first to do evolution experiments?
Yes.. now, we were... came in... it was my friend Sol Spiegelman who really was a pioneer in doing the first experiments... cell-free evolution.
[Q] But he made it more on a qualitative level, I understood.
That's not... I wouldn't call it qualitative. He did already quantitative measurements, but at that time there was no theory yet and he didn't choose the best possible conditions because he couldn't know about certain... For instance, he used an enzyme which he isolated from a bacterial virus, Q-beta virus, and that enzyme is able in a cell-free solution to replicate nucleic acid so he can do wonderful experiments on replication of nucleic acids. But he didn't know about error threshold. So he did not use a whole phage Q-beta and many of these quantitative experiments that he rather used relatively short nucleic acid strengths, let's say 200 base... they have 200 bases. The true virus, Q-beta, has 4600 or over 4000 such pairs and its error rate, its mutation rate, is adapted to this length, in other words it is just at the error threshold for this long strand. Now using only these short strands of 200 bases means that he is much too precise, so evolution is slow, he makes too few errors. And therefore what he could show were principle things, but quantitatively one could do much better.
[Q] But nevertheless he is the pioneer of evolution experiments.
Yes. One of the problems in evolution is, as you know, the natural process went on over many, many years, so you want to have a indefinite...
[Q] Perpetual...?
... perpetuation of evolution, but since the substances grow you will soon have populated everything.
