What is life? How did life start on planet earth 3.5 billion years ago, and which molecules / chemical systems lead to biology? Could evolution be the ultimate creationist? Is there a general theory of evolution that extends to all matter? Can we make or evolve life from scratch in a matter of hours?

This first episode of the new series of Science & Cocktails begins with the research lead by a man who is trying to answer one of the most fundamental questions in human history: how did life begin? Did it come in a comet which collided with the planet earth? Instead of tracing back the past of the evolution process and find what originated the first biological organisms, Leroy Cronin is trying to create life from scratch in his laboratory.

In the middle of all the 3D printed laboratory equipment, a bunch of chemists at the Cronin Lab are trying to understand what is the minimal chemical system that can undergo Darwinian evolution, that is, purely chemical systems which lead to autonomous entities capable of replication and adaptive behaviour. Cronin, the man who has appeared in the show Through the Wormhole by Morgan Freeman, will explain the details of his experiments and discuss how major steps are being made towards creating new types of synthetic biology and hence arriving closer and closer to the ultimate recipe of the primordial soup.

Afterwards, chilled primordial cocktails created before life even existed, and while the electronic music of Jakob Schmid and the visuals of MOTORSAW will be live on stage. Schmid will play a set of tracks, temporally and spectrally transformed into completely unrecognizable sounds by an experimental piece of software that he is currently working on. A spacey, atmospheric and weird experience accompanied by the highly complex visual patterns created by MOTORSAW.