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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 2.
Appearances
What he's saying is that, you know, acid and alkali, there's a whole spectrum between them.
And there's a spectrum between being a living thing and a non-living thing.
And
These spud cells are further along the spectrum towards being a living thing than anything else anyone's ever made in a lab, I would say.
But are they all the way there?
No, not really.
They can't reproduce themselves perfectly.
They have almost no metabolism.
But their proponents say that this is a way of understanding life unlike any other.
People are used to the idea of pure science, science you can't.
You just pursue because you want to know something.
And these are kind of pure engineering.
They're things that you build because you want to know how to build things.
By building it from the bottom up, you have to think through the function of everything that happens, and when you look at the cell, you know the function of everything that happens.
And that's not true of living cells that have been reproduced the old-fashioned way.
No one knows quite how a living cell works.
These spud cells do a lot less, but the
scientists who created them know exactly why they do what they do.
In theory the people involved hope to be able to build cells that are really streamlined for doing particular things, but I think they are mostly research tools.
I mean for pretty obvious reasons.
Showing 101–120 of 275 · page 6 of 14
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