Oliver Morton
speaker
275 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 7 Sep
Oliver Morton’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 — 4 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 2.
Appearances
That opens up a crucial connection.
Once you add that to the origin of species and to Darwin, you get this extraordinary vertiginous feeling that all cells are descended from earlier cells, all the way back to cells from whom not just all humans, but all living things are descended.
It all goes back in one long chain.
Except
At the University of Minnesota.
Well there a lab run by Kate Adamala has created cells which are synthetic.
They are made from scratch, from chemicals you could take off the shelf.
They have no ancestors, they have not evolved, they are creations of the laboratory.
They're the first that can reproduce themselves.
People have made cells before, but they've taken these synthetic cells further than anyone has by building what's called the spud cell, a line of cells that can reproduce themselves for a small but real number of generations.
And in terms of what you put together in a lab, that's pretty something.
Well, it's a matter of sort of like squeezing out little bits of membranes so that they take a little bit of gloop inside them.
That's a technical term, gloop.
And inside that there are seven different little DNA molecules that are acting as the chromosomes.
And reading those DNA molecules produces some of the things that the cell needs, but they are fed little sort of like feeder blobs which add to their membranes and eventually when
When the membranes get big enough, the genes cause them to snip themselves in two and you get two of these little spud cells.
So to most people, alive is a very sort of like binary thing, you're alive or you're not.
It's much more complicated within the biology lab, and this was put into words beautifully by a chemist in the nineteen thirties called Bill Peary, who was a Bolshe guy, and he said of life and death, the words still have a very definite meaning when used by poets, knackers or soldiers, but little or none when used by
Used to describe the phenomena observed in tissue culture, virus research, and kinetic studies of enzyme systems.
And it's kind of true.
Showing 81–100 of 275 · page 5 of 14
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