Keep pulling the thread on Dr. Kate Adamala.
A switch to sourcing all molecules from biology instead of petrochemicals is necessary for the planet to remain habitable in 50 years.
SPUD cells are capable of genetically encoded division, where the cell expresses a protein that recruits another protein from the environment to induce membrane curvature and division.
Expressing all the necessary proteins for a ribosome and assembling them does not result in an active ribosome, and the reason for this failure is unknown.
The process of ribogenesis, or how to create new ribosomes, is currently the single biggest unsolved mystery in bioengineering.
The primary bottleneck to using SPUD cells for therapeutic production is their inefficient replication, not the process of programming them to create a specific molecule.
The scientific community concluded that a "mirror cell" should never be created because there is no way to do so safely, due to the risk of it replicating uncontrollably.
As of the time of the interview, all major global research initiatives aimed at building a mirror cell or related technologies have been stopped.
NASA has a working definition of life as a "self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution."
The current inability to fully understand life is due to a lack of data, not because the phenomenon is inherently incomprehensible.
The overarching goal of Dr. Kate Adamala's research is to make biology a general-purpose technology.
Natural biology cannot become a general-purpose technology because it is too complicated and has too many poorly understood dependencies.
Natural cells are not fully engineerable because they are not fully describable or chemically defined.