The Future of Immune Systems

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I just get the impression that 100 years from now, everyone's body will be filled with these little designed organisms. We are basically trying to program those little cells to go in and act as natural analogs to the immune system. And fighting allergies and things like that? I mean, maybe even combating cancer? I don't know. But we're mostly looking at things that are very deadly and very variable because there's no such disease as cancer.

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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