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 know, for a decent time in its environment.
Well, I think that fundamental question of what is it about particular assemblies of chemicals, of inanimate matter, suddenly crosses the threshold to life.
But if we're looking at applications, what are these cells for?
Well, they will say, we want to use them to study models of life.
Because we know everything going into it, we can generate digital models of life and we can start playing around with simulations of life, which is pretty cool.
But more practically, you can program them, you can build them from the ground up so that they're producing drugs, fuels, foods, new materials.
And so you can just have vats of these things churning out whatever substance you want because you've built the whole thing from scratch.
And that is its dedicated role in life, if it is life.
This is ridiculously...
one of the hardest questions in biology.
There is no agreed upon definition of what is life.
I mean, NASA has this definition that they use in their astrobiology work, and they have it defined as a self-sustained chemical system capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution.
And this is about life as we know it.
So it's self-sustained.
It can keep going and going and going in its environment.
It can adapt to its environment and so on.
But other scientists will point to other things and they will say, well, look,
Metabolism is really key.
So taking in nutrients, being able to process those, things like homeostasis, that is a really important part of life as I see it.
So there's more of a checklist really that you go through and say, well, look, if it can do this and it can do X, Y and Z,
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