Build-a-Cell: An International Collaboration

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build-a-cell is an international collaboration that's supposed to bring together people that work on building cells. We would like to unify the community around this idea that biology is engineerable and biology fundamentally should be engineerable. It reminded me a little bit of large-scale particle physics experiments. Are you going to reach the particle physics scale where there are thousands of authors on every paper? I would love that, but not there yet.

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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