Penny Sarchet

speaker

1,083 appearances 19 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 3d ago

Penny Sarchet’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 — 19 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 7.

Appearances

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

But shall we do the name first? voice-verified

It's quite a cool name. voice-verified

Spud Sal. voice-verified

Why is it called that? voice-verified

But the challenge with this is sort of compounded with how they gave it the DNA, isn't it? voice-verified

Because it's very impressive. voice-verified

In previous attempts to do minimal cells, we've been talking about bacteria with things like 900 genes or nearly 500. voice-verified

And this is just 36. voice-verified

But am I right in understanding, you know, you might imagine that they'd all be on one bacterial chromosome, but actually they're in loads of different pieces in the cell. voice-verified

And it's very hard to divide that up accurately. voice-verified

So then it's replicating to a degree. voice-verified

It's feeding. voice-verified

Is it alive? voice-verified

I wonder if the ribosome is key, because often when you talk about the origins of life, we think the ribosome, the ability to make your own proteins and then to make your own factories that make the proteins is really important to self-sustaining life. voice-verified

Presumably that's something they're working on. voice-verified

Shall we talk about the motivations for work like this? voice-verified

I guess we're learning about the nuts and bolts of what do you actually need to build a cell, but what more is there to this sort of field of research? voice-verified

I did find the Stata Dome's eye-catching, though, even if they're decades away. voice-verified

One of the things that Adama has said is that this could lead to a way to make petrochemicals with living biology so that we can stop extracting all the kinds of chemicals that we often forget come from oil. voice-verified

Things that we use for pharmaceuticals and cosmetics and plastics and everything, get them from bacterial cells instead of having to dig up fossil fuels. voice-verified

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