The Importance of Complex Life Cells

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Life in general, it's a black box. We don't know what all the proteins are actually doing. Is there some dream at some point of being able to type in a genome sequence and just simulate on the computer what it will do? It would be amazing and people are working towards it but it's impossible right now because we don't knowWhat happens ever? We can make things that are not alive but are quite complex. What stops them from being alive? Well, I think it's the same thing. In our system it's engineerable from the first principles.

Scientists can’t quite agree on how to define “life,” but that hasn’t stopped them from studying it, looking for it elsewhere, or even trying to create it. Kate Adamala is one of a number of scientists engaged in the ambitious project of trying to create living cells, or something approximating them, starting from entirely non-living ingredients. Impressive progress has already been made. Designing cells from scratch will have obvious uses is biology and medicine, but also allow us to build biological robots and computers, as well as helping us understand how life could have arisen in the first place, and what it might look like on other planets.

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Katarzyna (Kate) Adamala received her Ph.D. working with Pier Luigi Luisi at the University of Rome and Jack Szostak at Harvard. She is currently an assistant professor of Genetics, Cell Biology, and Development at the University of Minnesota. She is a member of the Build-A-Cell international collaboration, which brings together multiple groups to work on constructing artificial life.

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