Michael Le Page

speaker

580 appearances 7 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 4d ago

Michael Le Page’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 4.

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The World, the Universe and Us · Breakthrough Synthetic Cell Has Just Reproduced - But Is It Alive? · 3 Jul 2026 podcast

Well, yeah, but it's... So far.

It's because they're using other bacteria to multiply the bits of DNA that they then put into the spud cell.

And these bacteria don't like to make big pieces of DNA.

So it can be done, but it takes a lot of time.

So to speed things up, they just use these smaller pieces of DNA.

But then that means you've got seven instead of one and you've got problems with dividing them.

between the cells.

So, you know, they will definitely create a single piece of DNA.

They have all the genes of them in the future when they're happy with what they've got.

But this is a work in progress.

I would say no at the moment.

And the main reason is not only does it need a lot of help doing all these things and it can't do it by itself, but they sort of fail after about five replications.

They just sort of stop doing much.

The team isn't quite sure why, but the speculation is, you remember I said earlier that they have to be supplied with the protein making factories that are producing the ribosomes.

And so the thinking is that those ribosomes are just gradually sort of sort of wearing out and failing.

And then once the C cells, these spud cells can't make their own proteins and everything goes wrong.

So I think obviously the team want to get to the point where they can make their own ribosomes.

That's something that they're working on already.

And if that enables them to keep dividing indefinitely, then they're getting much closer to life.

And then the other thing that Kate said to me is that she would want them to be capable of evolution as well.

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