Nobel Prize winner Paul Nurse addressed Chinese students in Beijing on Tuesday, discussing the nature and characteristics of life. He emphasized the important role of young people in generating new research ideas and solving unknown problems.

Nurse, president of the Royal Society in the United Kingdom and a 2001 Nobel laureate in physiology or medicine, recounted the stories of scientific giants such as Gregor Mendel, the pioneer of the mathematical foundation of genetics, and Charles Darwin, the architect of the theory of evolution by natural selection, to explain key biological theories.

Nurse said that life is more than just a series of chemical and physical processes; it is a complex system that depends on information storage and regulation. He also emphasized that all life on Earth descends from a common ancestor and has evolved through natural selection.

The lecture was held at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, with more than 300 students from China and abroad attending. When answering a student's question about new problems, he noted that young people are instrumental in sparking innovative research concepts and tackling uncharted challenges.

"I would ask people like you rather than people like me for the answer to that question ... because that's where the answers are coming from," he said.

Nurse expressed his hope to collaborate with young people in solving problems in his research field of cell reproduction and emphasized that establishing links between scientists from China and the UK is of great significance.