Ian Sample
speaker
2,123 appearances
29 recordings
3 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 5d ago
Ian Sample’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 29 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 8.
Appearances
You're not going to be staring down the microscope for all of that time.
And so for her, it was a much more drawn out process, but she still found it pretty stunning.
Other research labs, and this one, have done sort of elements of this before.
They've done small parts of the work in isolation.
And I think what's nice about this study is that they're pulling a lot of it together and showing we can get all these different processes working at the same time.
I mean, what Kate would say is this is a chassis.
This is a starting point, the bare essentials that you could then start to try and build on, say, okay, how do we make it more capable?
How do we make it more resilient, more robust?
How do we get it to respond to its environment, to protect itself in a sense, have things like we call homeostasis, which is just controlling your environment.
A living cell has to be able to control its environment so it doesn't get too hot or too cold.
so the chemical reactions can run properly.
And so I think it's a big step and an interesting step, but it's still very much square one.
There are other labs looking at exactly this kind of approach where you go from the bottom up.
And I think they will be the labs that will be joining in this effort and seeing, well, look, if we start with the sort of spud cell idea, can we all start just agreeing approaches, say, look, I'm going to work on how to get these cells to build their own ribosomes.
And these are little cellular machines that cells have to produce their own proteins.
How can I get it to clear its waste?
Things like that.
But, you know, there's other groups going top down.
So they will start with a living organism and they will just trim away, trim away, trim away, trying to get rid of genes that are on the genome that are useful for that species, but aren't necessary for life.
So the interest there is to say, OK, what is the bare minimum that biology says an organism needs to survive, but also to survive genetically?
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