Betül Kaçar

It's a party and it's like everybody's invited and they need to operate together, right?

And what's really cool about it, I think, there are many things that are very interesting about this thing, but if you remove it from the cell and put it in a cell-free environment, it

works just fine, right?

So you can get cell-free translation systems.

Put this translation in a test tube and it is

doing its thing.

It doesn't need the rest of the cell to translate information.

Of course, you need to feed the information, at least so far, because we are far from evolving a translation, maybe not so far, evolving a translation in the lab or a machinery that can process information as it generates it.

We have not done that yet.

Because it's far more than chemistry.

You need biology, obviously.

You need biochemistry.

You need to think, as I think network systems folk, you need to think about computation.

You need to think about information.

And that is not happening yet, except we are trying to bring this perspective forward.

But the more you understand how information systems work, once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

It's one of those things.

Yes, and chemistry can happen even if you strip some of the parts out.

You can get very minimal level of information processing that does not look anything like the translation that cells relies on, but chemists showed from linear... You can generate information that arrives to a processing center in the form of a linear polymer.

The informatic part of this system that I think sets it apart from computation and from metabolism comes in if you think about the information itself, right?