Rowan Hooper

speaker

1,494 appearances 19 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 4d ago

Rowan Hooper’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 Jul 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

And you imagine cell division would have started by just a physical process. voice-verified

The vesicle just becomes too big and splits it apart. voice-verified

And then what the cell has to do eventually is figure out a way, well, let's get DNA equally into those two bits. voice-verified

And that's not where we're at yet. voice-verified

But you can see that's where the next step needs to be. voice-verified

Yeah, but what I think is one of the most interesting things about this work is that, I think most scientists would already know this, but normal people probably don't, is that life is not a binary on-off thing. voice-verified

So you hesitated when Penny said, is it alive? voice-verified

You're not, I don't, you would say, I would say no. voice-verified

But that's so interesting. voice-verified

Like life is something that's smeared out across something that is definitely dead to something that we all would say is alive. voice-verified

And it doesn't suddenly flip it. voice-verified

When does it flip from one to the other? voice-verified

So we've gone along that road towards something living. voice-verified

Yes. voice-verified

And we've done that artificially. voice-verified

And that is something really amazing. voice-verified

I think that's something really to be applauded as well, isn't it? voice-verified

And before, you know, with the Venta stuff, they very famously kept it all to themselves, right? voice-verified

when they're sequencing the human genome, but also with the synthetic life stuff. voice-verified

So this is, I mean, it's really admirable that they've made it open source, but also it's very practical, as you say, you know, no one could, this is a very complex thing. voice-verified

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