Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll.

And it has been said that while the 20th century was the century of physics,

the 21st century will belong to biology.

I'm not sure if that's true or not. I think the 21st century is big enough to have more than one science in it.

There's plenty of room for both physics and biology to do good things,

but there's no question that the rate of progress in biology has been pretty amazing in recent years

and shows no sign of slowing down, especially in our ability to really manipulate what's going on

down at the level of cells and even individual strands of DNA.

Those of you who are longtime Mindscape listeners will remember a conversation we had with Kate Atomala,

who works on synthetic life, putting together cells from scratch, right?

I mean, we don't quite have that done yet, but this program of building a cell,

starting with our human knowledge rather than from existing biology.

What we have done so far is taking existing organisms, removing their DNA,

by an organism, I mean a little tiny one celled organism,

removing its DNA and inserting DNA that we have designed and seeing whether or not it will keep going.

So a few years ago, scientists at the Ventner Institute, named after Craig Ventner,

were able to build what is essentially we think of the minimal cell

that actually works in some sense, that actually reproduces itself and so forth.

But to be honest, it didn't reproduce itself that well, you know, like we hope

that an individual cell will split into so that both halves look more or less like the original cell,

that's not happening with these minimal cells.

So today's guest is Elizabeth Strahalski, who works as the group leader of the cellular engineering group

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