Kate Adamala

If you look at the entirety of biology, it actually, and I'm going to piss off a lot of biologists by saying that, but biology from the chemical point of view is actually really boring.

It uses only 22 amino acids out of hundreds possible amino acids.

And that's another motivation for engineering cells from scratch, is we want to be able to invent things, to do things that biology never bothered doing.

The synthetic cell would be like a bookstore that you're filling one shelf at a time.

You know what sections you want.

And using Drew's analogy, you're filling it to have all the books that you're interested in.

But because you're putting them in, you know where they go.

You know what books you put in and you know where they're supposed to move.

It's still tiny, but because we built it from the parts that we know about and we know what they're supposed to be doing, then we can actually understand and most importantly, predict where they go.

Because it's not just about understanding where they used to go.

It's about predicting where they are going to go where you do something.

And that would be a synthetic cell.

It would be a bookstore with a really good inventory because we know what goes into a synthetic cell and we can grow it

And that's the most fascinating to me as an engineer is I don't want to just build something complex.

I actually want to know why it works the way it does.

There is no natural living cell that we can have a full chemical ingredient list for.

And we don't know all the genes even in the simplest cell.

The builder cell is different than just the construction of a cell with synthetic genome, because there was a living recipient cell that was the recipient of that genome transplantation.

So it wasn't building a cell from non-living components.

We learned a ton in the last decade, decade and a half now, about how molecules come together to form.

drive those very basic processes of biology.

So now we're finally starting to be able to conceptualize how we would go about not just making a synthetic genome, but booting up the whole thing from scratch.

So it's really kind of like a black box.

And that gives us this full operational control over every element of it.

Yes.

Every time you build something, you're limiting the possibilities because you have to make choices.

And biology has been making those choices for over 3 billion years.

So we did reject a lot of possible alternatives.

And we're now revisiting all those alternatives.

That's the fascinating part of it is we can see what else can be done with biological parts.

It's very difficult for me to answer that because there is no good definition of life.

But we're getting to the point where if it quacks like a cell, moves like a cell, then it's starting to be a cell-like entity.

And that's where the field is.

We don't have the complexity that approaches the natural biological cell, but we have systems that can perform all the functions of a cell.

Mm-hmm.

Building a cell from scratch is absolutely essential to realize the promise of bioengineering.

When the field was started by Drew and others, they made huge promises.

They said we'll be able to make things with biology.

We'll be able to have this green economy.

Those promises have to be realized.

Because the way the world is going right now, we cannot keep running our economy on petrochemicals, on oil.

We have to build more equitable economy.

And we have to really understand biology on this very fundamental molecular level.

And all those things will not happen unless we truly understand this very basic building block, which is a cell.

And I believe we will not be able to understand a complex natural cell unless we can actually build it.