The Future of Bio Manufacturing

2min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

We need to ramp up our bioengineering bio manufacturing capabilities. We do not have right now a good replacement for all the petrochemicals. Another thing is we're kind of slowly entering this area of so-called personalized medicine where we want to make drugs in small quantities tailored to the needs of every particular patient. If you could have a platform that's very versatile, easily programmable to make small amounts of biomolecules that can be used as medicine or notrions on demand when you need it, where you need it and not more and no less, that would be really useful.

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.