Michael Le Page

speaker

580 appearances 7 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 5d 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

So if they're dividing indefinitely and evolving, she would regard them as living.

It is amazing.

So, you know, there's all this debate about viruses and are they alive or not.

And obviously they depend on other cells.

But then every cell depends on other cells to some extent.

So, yeah, it's very hard to draw a line and give a clear definition.

This is living and this is not living.

Yes, they want to put in a cytoskeleton, that's a sort of protein framework inside it that will help it divide more neatly and separate the bits of DNA properly.

Then they want to add a ribosome and things like that.

So they've got this long to-do list.

The thing to say is these are going to be very difficult to achieve, but they've released this as open source so that everyone around the world can sort of chip in and help sort of make this better if they want to.

So this isn't just going to be one team trying to do them by itself.

Yeah, it'll be interesting to see how many people chip in and start working on this.

But I imagine it will be quite a few.

So the classic thing that a synthetic biologist will tell you, if you take an existing living organism and try and make it do something...

it's really difficult.

So you sort of change one thing and you find you've broken 10 others that you didn't even know were connected.

And that's because of the way evolution works.

Evolution just sort of takes what's there and adapts it to do lots of different things.

And so it's really hard to change some existing living cells to do what you want to do.

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