Regina G. Barber

Synthetic biology is not a reality yet, but it's on the horizon, especially now that engineers have taken the helm.

Today on the show, DIY cells.

We dive into what it would look like to be inside of a cell.

Why scientists are bothering with making a cell from scratch.

and how engineers are leading the field.

I'm Regina Barber, and you're listening to ShoreWave, the science podcast from NPR.

Okay, Drew, before we can build a cell, we have to understand them.

And I've always had a really hard time visualizing what's happening inside of a cell.

But you have this really cool way to think of them as a building, right?

Yeah, scale it up.

Yeah, and just have actors doing the things inside the cell and moving things.

It's like those terrible bookstores, you know, where they have those piles of books and you're like, get organized like that place.

Well, see, this is where we get to the next question, Kate, is that what if we could build a cell so that we could understand it better?

So, like, how would you describe the synthetic cell you're building towards?

Okay, so Drew, when did the idea of building a cell, a synthetic cell, start to seem possible?

Like what's the history here?

OK, so, Kate, I was going to ask you about that.

That's more of the bottom up approach.

That's what was going on in 2010 when, like Drew just said, this group of scientists, they like, quote, built a genome from scratch and used it to control a cell.

Only the genome was synthetic, right?