The Importance of Functional Definitions of Life

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Right now we don't have a good definition to say if it actually is alive or not. People are starting to agree that we can make an experimentally trackable list of characteristics and if we find something that fits some of those, then we'll be really happy. So what would be on your personal list of characteristics that you would call kind of lifey? I like chemostasis because... Oh, homostasis. It's a maintaining internal environment that is significantly different in composition from the external environment. And ability to maintain it actively, so not just be different than environment but actually work for it - that's homostasis to me. Good.

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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