What does it mean to be alive? Our origins are the horizon of our understanding, and as with the physical horizon, our approach brings us no closer. The more we learn, the more mysterious it all becomes. What if we’re asking the wrong questions? Maybe life did not begin at all, but rather coalesced piecemeal, a set of properties contingent and convergent, plural, more than once? Maybe the origin of life is happening right now, just over the horizon, forming something new anew. Let’s get into the weeds and see if we can find a continuity between biology and physics.
Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe.
This week we speak with Kate Adamala, synthetic biologist and professor at the University of Minnesota, about her research to produce synthetic minimal cells that are not technically alive but can perform myriad biological processes. Along the way the distant past and future meet. Can we build life? Or can we grow machines?
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Referenced in this episode:
Nonenzymatic Template-Directed RNA Synthesis Inside Model Protocells
Engineering genetic circuit interactions within and between synthetic minimal cells
Competition between model protocells driven by an encapsulated catalyst
Synthetic cells in biomedical applications
Parasites, infections and inoculation in synthetic minimal cells
Build-a-Cell: Engineering a Synthetic Cell Community
The Andromeda Strain and the Meaning of Life: Monolith Monologues
Sara Walker on The Physics of Life and Planet-Scale Intelligence
What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly
Matthew Jackson on Social & Economic Networks
Scott Page
Mind Children by Hans Moravec
The Multiple Paths to Multiple Life
Michael Lachmann
Terraforming the Biosphere by Ricard Solé
Scaling Laws & Social Networks in The Time of COVID-19 with Geoffrey West (Part 1)
Red Queen
