Drew Endy

All of bioengineering right now is Edisonian.

Tinker and test, tinker and test.

We don't know when we go to make something happen, if it'll work or not, until we build it and test it.

I truly believe that as the engineers learn how to construct cells, there will still be profound mysteries in biology and life that will lurk underneath.

Building cells from scratch is no longer a research project.

It's now an engineering project, which means we can plan to do it and anticipate deadlines.

And it's right in front of us.

Yeah, the question that motivates thinking about a cell as a building is, are cells intrinsically complicated?

Or do they just appear to be complicated because they're so darn tiny?

And so we can't see what's going on.

And so as a mental...

exercise, imagine taking a cell that might be a millionth of a meter across, a micron, super tiny, and now imagine making it magically a hundred meters long.

So we're going to scale up.

We're going to multiply the size of the cell by a factor of a hundred million with a magic wand.

You know, the cell's not this solid object.

It's an object comprised of smaller objects, molecules.

And so now we can, at this scale of a 100-meter cell, a building-sized cell—by the way, I would love for somebody to build a building that's a cell.

Yeah, totally.

Or like Roombas or whatever.

But so a protein inside this building-sized cell is going to be about as big as a basketball.