Introduction

2min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

Sean Carroll: One of the things I'm fascinated by is the boundary between living and not quite living. Today we're going to be talking to Kate Adamala who's an assistant professor of genetics, cell biology and development at the University of Minnesota. We don't yet have a working artificial cell that is truly alive in the sense that it reproduces, it goes its own way. But in some sense that's better as we can tune proto-cells to do things that are useful to us without worrying about them reproducing too much or taking over the world.

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.

Support Mindscape on Patreon or Paypal.

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.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.