The Complexity of Life

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I'm actually a big fan of the Iranian evolution for the living system. I don't know of any better way to evolve than a Iranian evolution but every individual organism does not have to undergo their Iranian evolution. The fact that you and I do not have children is not going to stop us being alive. Members of our species do. Exactly. And that's to me, that's another very important property. We as life are just insanely complex and we don't understand what properties of what we are come as those emergent properties of complex molecules interacting with each other. But there is a certain threshold of complexity of molecules and the ways molecules interact with each other that we're only finding living systems

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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