There are more human cells in your body than there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy! Cells are the fundamental building blocks of life but that doesn’t mean they are simple – biology still doesn’t have a full picture of how exactly a living cell works. Host Regina G. Barber talks with bioengineers Kate Adamala and Drew Endy about why scientists are trying to build a cell from scratch, piece by piece. They 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.Want more bioengineering stories? Email us at [email protected] to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
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You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. There are more cells in your body than there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Our galaxy has a couple hundred billion stars, and inside me and you, each of us has around 30 trillion human cells. 30 trillion! Cells are the fundamental building blocks of life. But that doesn't mean they're simple.
Biology still doesn't have a full picture of how exactly a living cell works.
There is no natural living cell that we can have a full chemical ingredient list for. And we don't know all the genes even in the simplest cell. So it's really kind of like a black box.
That's Kate Ademala. A biological engineer at the University of Minnesota, she wants to do what only nature has done. Build a cell from scratch. A synthetic cell that replicates itself, but was made in a lab.
All of bioengineering right now is Edisonian. Tinker and test, tinker and test. We don't know when we go to make something happen, if it'll work or not, until we build it and test it.
Drew Endy is an engineer at Stanford University and part of a community co-founded by Kate called Build a Cell. This is an international group of researchers with the same goal, to build a cell from the bottom up, piece by biological piece.
If you look at the entirety of biology, it actually, and I'm going to piss off a lot of biologists by saying that, but biology from the chemical point of view is actually really boring. It uses only 22 amino acids out of hundreds possible amino acids.
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