Welcome to Quantum Magazine's podcast.

Each episode, we bring you stories about developments in science and mathematics.

I'm Susan Vallett.

Back in 2000, Michael Ellowitz of Caltech was still a grad student at Princeton University,

but he accomplished a remarkable feat in the

young field of synthetic biology.

He became one of the first to design and demonstrate a kind of functioning circuit in living

cells.

But molecular signaling systems of complex cells aren't as simple as electronic circuits.

That's next.

Quantum Magazine is an editorially independent online publication supported by the Simon's Foundation to enhance public understanding

of science.

More than two decades ago, Michael Ellowitz and his mentor, Stanislaus Liebler, inserted a suite

of genes into Escher-Ikia coli bacteria that induced

controlled swings in the cell's production of a fluorescent protein. It was like an oscillator

in electronic circuitry. It was a brilliant illustration of what biologist and Nobel laureate Francois Jacob called

the logic of life, a tightly controlled flow of information from genes to traits in cells

and other organisms.

But this lucid vision of circuit-like logic, which worked so elegantly in bacteria, too often fails in more complex

cells. Angela DePace, a systems biologist at Harvard Medical School, says in bacteria, single

proteins regulate things. In more complex organisms, she says there are a lot more proteins involved.

Recently, Elowitz and his coworkers looked closely at the protein interactions within one key

...