Part of the motivation for conducting science is hope: the hope that what you're doing, research-wise, could end up revolutionizing how we conceptualize reality. Although we've come so far in understanding this Universe - including what its laws and constituents are at a fundamental level, and how those fundamental components assemble to create the varied and complex reality we inhabit today - we're certain that there's still more to learn, as many paradoxes about and several important puzzles remain unsolved.
Science is neither a collection of facts nor merely a process, but rather the combination of both. All at once, science is simultaneously the full suite of knowledge that we gain from observing, measuring, and performing experiments that test the Universe, as well as the process through which we perform those investigations and refine our conclusions based on an ever-increasing set of data.
Szostak began his talk by posing a question to the audience: Is life common in the universe, or is Earth a rare exception? While the discovery of exoplanets leads many to believe life could be widespread, Szostak said that the complexity of cell formation makes that seem less probable. Central to Szostak's talk was the "RNA World" hypothesis - the idea that early life initially revolved around RNA molecules before the advent of complex cellular structures.
When most of us think about science, we don't often think about something very fundamental to the enterprise: what the goal of it all actually is. Reality is a complicated place, and the only tools we have to guide us in understanding what it is and how it works is the combination of what we can observe, measure, and experiment on.