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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 peace.

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