He is interested in the origin and evolution of life, especially the evolution of metabolism, as well as in the history of ideas about the natural origin of life and its artificial synthesis. He has published both scientific articles and popular science texts on these subjects.

He is professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Valencia and researcher at the Institute for Integrative Systems Biology (I2SysBio), a joint centre University of Valencia-CSIC. Likewise, he has been secretary and vice-president of the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life (ISSOL-The International Astrobiology Society), which appointed him Fellow in 2014. He adapted the text of Darwin's Origin of Species in Spanish for the series Sin Fronteras published by Publicacions de la Universitat de València.