Drew Endy

How are they alive?

If we could see it and follow it in real time, I'm 100% certain we could figure it out.

It's just that it's moving so fast and it's so darn tiny, we haven't been able to follow it exactly right yet.

Yeah, I'll give my version and then I beg Kate to chime in too.

I see there's three different factions or groups that were interested and are interested in the topic.

One are the folks who are interested in the origins of life.

where does life come from?

And so that tribe, if you will, or group has been working towards building cells for a very long time.

Then there's another group that's been taking natural cells and whittling them down to remove all the extra pieces they can and building synthetic genomes with just the stuff needed to keep it going and making a type of minimal synthetic cell starting from natural cells.

And that's been going on for a couple of decades.

And then over the last decade plus, the third group, the engineers are arriving.

And genetic engineering is 50 years old.

That starts by moving small numbers of genes around.

By 2010 or so, the people from that group are getting good enough that they can begin to put together 30 or 40 gene systems, making sophisticated biochemical pathways in natural cells.

There's a subtle point in what Kate's describing that's central to building cells from scratch, which is we're not constrained to any one natural cell.

So all of life on Earth in nature descends or derives from the life that's already here.

That's lineage, right?

We come from our parents and so on.

If you're minimizing a natural cell, you're operating within the context of lineage.

And if you wanted to understand it, you can take this top-down approach, as you say, which is to begin to remove pieces bit by bit and see if it's still alive.