Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll and as might be becoming clear through the various topics of the podcast

One of the things I'm fascinated by is the boundary between living and not quite living by which I mean artificial life, artificial synthetic intelligence, robots, all the different ways in which we can build things that are have some life-like qualities

but yet aren't really alive and on the other side how living things are manifestations of underlying physical processes.

So today we're going to be talking to Kate Adomala who's an assistant professor of genetics, cell biology and development at the University of Minnesota

and Kate is involved in building synthetic life, building individual cells from scratch.

This is something, this is a field artificial life, synthetic biology that has a bunch of successes and controversies to its name.

There's different things you can do. So famously Craig Ventner got in the news years ago, roughly 10 years ago now, for building the first artificial organism

but which was a tremendous accomplishment but what really happened is he took a pre-existing bacterial cell, removed its genome,

and replaced it with a genome that he had synthesized, he and his team of course had synthesized, they had written a new DNA strand

and that booted up inside the cell and got it going but it clearly wasn't starting from scratch.

So Kate and her collaborators are among a group of people who are trying to literally build cells from scratch, the cell wall, all the internal workings and so forth.

We don't yet have a working artificial cell that is truly alive in the sense that it reproduces, it goes its own way

but in some sense that's better as we learn in this conversation we can tune proto-cells to do things that are useful to us without worrying about them reproducing too much and going crazy and taking over the world.

So Kate is a member of a large collaboration called Build a Cell where we are working toward this goal of actually creating a self-sustaining cell, all by itself from purely synthetic ingredients.

And what we will be able to do with that, the prospects, the frontiers for the future here are truly amazing to me.

It's really worth a very beginning of a revolution in this kind of thing and Kate's an extremely articulate spokesperson for this kind of work.

So this is definitely a fun, mind-bending, and slightly provocative kind of podcast.

So let's go!

Kate Adamala, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.

Thank you, it's great to be here.

So you know as someone who's done cosmology in my life, I sometimes get accused of playing God, thinking about the universe all at once and so I'm very happy to be here with someone who creates life in their laboratory,

you're way closer to playing God than I ever will be.

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