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

And even then, wouldn't we just be better starting with living cells?

I mean, they were already widely used to produce a whole range of chemicals now.

I think it will, but they are starting at a fairly... I mean, they're taking fairly advanced bacterial genes here and using them as a building block.

So this is after... They've skipped a few really important jumps.

They've skipped a billion years or so of evolution to get to this point.

But...

But obviously, you know, if once we start being able to do more things like this, then you can try and go back and recreate those earlier steps, which would be really exciting.

I mean, I've absolutely no doubt it's possible.

I mean, we've already sort of engineered some sort of very complex systems into, I think it's yeast, if I remember, where it makes a malarial drug and that took, you know, dozens of genes together.

It's definitely achievable.

The question is how long it takes and how efficient is, you know, how cost efficient is that process?

What Kate Damolo was saying to me is, you know, she thinks one of the issues is that a lot of these sort of petrochemicals are toxic to living cells.

And that's one of the problems you have when you try and make them in a normal bacterium or yeast, say, it kills them off.

And so she thinks the synthetic approach, you can sort of make cells that are resistant to those chemicals and therefore be better at manufacturing them.

We want them to replicate.

I mean, I think at this stage, this is like if you could think of it as a Frankenstein's monster, but a Frankenstein's monster that's bedridden, that has to be spoon fed.

It's not going to.

At this stage, there's absolutely no danger of running amok.

And then even if we can succeed in turning it into a true living cell that needs less help and can keep dividing indefinitely, you think of the bacteria that pose dangers to us, they do so because they've evolved to sort of challenge us and to get around our immune system and things like this.

That's all been stripped away here.

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