The biochemist Oscar Fernandez Capetillo one day in 2016 he attended a conference on the origin of life on Earth. The speaker was the American Jack Szostak, a winner of Nobel Prize in Medicine who was determined to find the recipe to generate a living being in the laboratory, from chemical ingredients already present on the primitive planet. After the lecture, the two met for coffee. Szostak no longer remembers the content of that conversation, but it stayed with Fernández Capetillo. That brief dialogue culminated five years later in the discovery of a mechanism that illuminates one of the most devastating human diseases: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (THE A).
