‘Beautiful blobs’: can scientists build life from scratch?

0:00Madeleine Finlay: This is The Guardian.

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1:48Scientists creating life from scratch Sounds like the premise of a sci-fi disaster movie But now a team of researchers say they've come closer than ever before With something they're calling a spud cell Their work raises profound questions like what is life? But also, why bother? So today, how close are we to building life in the lab? From The Guardian, I'm Madeleine Finlay, and this is Science Weekly.

2:31Ian, you've got some very interesting research to tell me about today. it's a step towards creating synthetic life so who's behind this and what have they done

2:43Madeleine Finlay: so this is a team from the university of minnesota led by kate ademala and she is a geneticist there and what they've been doing over the the years is working towards can you build life from scratch so just from chemicals that you know and understand what they've come up with is what they're calling a synthetic cell. It can grow, it can divide, and it can sort of replicate its own genome. And when I spoke to Kate, I asked her what these synthetic cells look like. To most people looking at it under the microscope, it doesn't look like much. It looks very similar to a very simple natural cell. It's a blob.

3:24It doesn't have any visible features like flagellum or any other kind of irregular shape. It's a round blob that becomes sometimes less round and it's budding.

3:36Madeleine Finlay: Wonderfully, they call it Spudsel. And that name is intended to evoke Sputnik as the dawn of the space age, the beginning of a new era. But Kate is from Poland and she says, well, look, another reason is that I'm mostly made from potatoes. So Spudsel seemed like a pretty fitting name. Well, if she says that, it's OK. Now, I want to dig a little deeper into what they've done. So what is this cell made of? Spud cell is essentially a small ball of like a fatty-like substance and inside it's liquid. So you can think of it as a small sort of water-filled sphere. They're very tiny. They're like a few microns across, a few thousandths of a millimetre.

4:20Madeleine Finlay: And inside that little sphere, they put a very small genome. and so that genome can do basic functions. So those functions can help it to do this growing, this feeding, the division and also this replicating of its own genome so that it can go into the daughter cells, the next generation cells and they've had it run over several generations. That sounds very impressive. It sounds like it can do quite a lot that a normal cell can do. So what can't it do? Well, it can't do an awful lot. I mean, this is incredibly basic in terms of the functions it can do. I mean, the genome inside it is about a 50th the size that you get in inside E.

5:05Madeleine Finlay: coli, which is a common bacteria you'll find in soil. it produces proteins which it needs and they help it fuse with little balls that are added to the sort of feedstock if you like added to the liquid that it lives in so it can sort of fuse to tiny little blobs and absorb them it needs to be fed these little blobs because they contain all sorts of stuff that the synthetic cell needs to do anything and a key thing it can't do on its own without being fed is it can't build its own proteins inside it needs these things called ribosomes, which turn genetic material into proteins. So the cell can't do that.

5:41Madeleine Finlay: It needs energy from the medium it's in. It needs crucial enzymes from the medium it's in. So essentially, an awful lot is done by the liquid that this spud cell is in. And if you took it out and put it anywhere else, it wouldn't survive. So is that why we wouldn't consider this cell to be alive? how should we understand exactly what this is the spud cell yeah and i think of them as starting blobs for making life and i was trying to think of other analogies and in a way they feel more like puppets to me and if you have a puppet obviously it might look like a person but you know someone is pulling the strings and in this case a lot of that liquid that this thing is in is pulling the strings and also i've got this little wind up easter chick and you put it down and it kind of hops along.

6:34Madeleine Finlay: But you wouldn't think it's nearly alive. I'm winding up a mechanical thing and it is tootling along on its own. It's very crudely mimicking something that you see in life. That's sort of being a little bit harsh on spud cells because spud cells are using DNA. They are doing things very differently to life, but they are doing things using biochemistry. But for me, they are sort of nearer the toy side of things or the puppet side of things than they are towards actual living cells. But I asked Kate why she didn't consider these cells to be alive as well. Mainly because it's not robust enough. To me, life, just kind of my gut feeling is life is associated with being robust.

7:17We think of life as this crappy process that can squeeze into every niche, every hole. And Spad Cell does not yet have this ability. So to me, it's a first step. It's a platform that will enable engineering eventually living more robust synthetic cells. But in the current iteration, it's, to me, not yet alive. What was Kate's reaction to seeing what she'd created? I mean, the fact that these are kind of things that resemble life but aren't alive. I assume she didn't have that kind of Frankensteinian big bolt of lightning moment.

7:55Madeleine Finlay: You know, the reality of being a scientist in a lab is that you spend an awful long time with things going wrong, with checking things have worked the way you think, with staring down microscopes. And so when something does happen, it may not be a particularly clearly defined event that you can point back to and say it was, you know, 12.33 on a Friday. I was in the lab and I saw it happen. and that that was the case here that she was really struck by seeing these spud cells divide but if you think about you know what happens with a living cell e coli divides in about 20 minutes you know these guys take about 12 hours so it's a very slow process you're not going to be staring down the microscope for all of that time and so for her it was you know a much more drawn out process but she still found it pretty stunning we do see it under the microscope but it's not a moment.

8:46It's kind of a drawn out process. And to me, they're one of the most beautiful images I've ever seen, but obviously unbiased.

8:59Ian, despite it not being this kind of moment where scientists have created life, it is pretty exciting. But perhaps you could put it in some context for me. I mean, how much of an advance is this on work that's been done before or elsewhere?

9:16Madeleine Finlay: Other research labs and this one have done sort of elements of this before. They've done small parts of the work in isolation. And I think what's nice about this study is that they're pulling a lot of it together and showing we can get all these different processes working at the same time. I mean, what Kate would say is this is a chassis. This is a starting point, the bare essentials that you could then start to try and build on. Say, OK, how do you make it more capable? How do we make it more resilient, more robust? How do we get it to respond to its environment, to protect itself in a sense, have things like we call homeostasis, which is just controlling your environment.

9:58Madeleine Finlay: A living cell has to be able to control its environment so it doesn't get too hot or too cold, so the chemical reactions can run properly. And so I think it's a big step and an interesting step, but it's still very much square one. And are there other labs attempting to do this? There are other labs looking at exactly this kind of approach where you go from the bottom up. And I think they will be the labs that will be joining in this effort and seeing, well, look, if we start with the sort of spud cell idea, can we all start just agreeing approaches, say, look, I'm going to work on how to get these cells to build their own ribosomes.

10:35Madeleine Finlay: And these are little cellular machines that cells have to produce their own proteins. How can I get it to clear its waste, things like that. But there's other groups going top down. So they will start with a living organism and they will just trim away, trim away, trim away, trying to get rid of genes that are on the genome that are useful for that species, but aren't necessary for life. So the interest there is to say, okay, what is the bare minimum that biology says an organism needs to survive, but also to survive for a decent time in its environment? And I have to ask, obviously, invoking Sputnik, there's an element to this of we're doing it to see if we can do it.

11:19But beyond the fundamental science, why are labs trying to do this?

11:24Madeleine Finlay: Well, I think that fundamental question of what is it about particular assemblies of chemicals, of inanimate matter, suddenly crosses the threshold to life. But if we're looking at applications, what are these cells for? Well, they will say, we want to use them to study models of life because we know everything going into it. We can generate digital models of life and we can start playing around with simulations of life, which is pretty cool. But more practically, you can program them. You can build them from the ground up so that they're producing drugs, fuels, foods, new materials. And so you can just have vats of these things churning out whatever substance you want because you've built the whole thing from scratch.

12:08Madeleine Finlay: and that is its dedicated role in life, if it is life.

12:16Coming up, what do we mean when we say something's alive?

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12:54Your call has been forwarded to an automatic voice message system. A missed call doesn't feel like anything. No red flag, no notifications screaming at you. it just disappears into your call log. And nine times out of 10, that was someone ready to hand you money. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, spelled Q-U-O, the business phone system built so you never miss a call. Here's what I like about it. All your calls, texts, and voicemails live in one place. So anyone on your team can pick up a conversation, see the full history, and respond fast. No more, wait, who talked to this customer last?

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14:02Ian, that takes us to a question, a really fundamental philosophical question that this work raises, which is, what is life? This is ridiculously one of the hardest questions in biology.

14:18Madeleine Finlay: There is no agreed upon definition of what is life. I mean, NASA has this definition that they use in their astrobiology work, and they have it defined as a self-sustained chemical system capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution. And this is about life as we know it. So it's self-sustained. It can keep going and going and going in its environment. It can adapt to its environment and so on. But other scientists will point to other things and they will say, well, look, metabolism is really key. So taking in nutrients, being able to process those, things like homeostasis, that is a really important part of life as I see it.

14:57Madeleine Finlay: So there's more of a checklist, really, that you go through and say, well, look, if it can do this and it can do X, Y and Z, it's life. But you have things that are sort of sit in this sort of weird space like viruses. I think most biologists don't consider viruses alive, but obviously they replicate, they mutate, they have a genome, and they basically hijack cells to do what they want to do in life. It's such an interesting question that this raises. Now, we've got some time to think about it, because obviously, as you've said, we're still very far away from creating synthetic life. But it feels to me like there's an element of risk in all of this.

15:38Is this something that Kate and scientists like her are thinking about?

15:44Madeleine Finlay: They absolutely are. And they really want all of this work to be done in the open. And they want to have just a sort of agreement on what we're going to do with these cells and what we're not going to do with these cells. If you wanted to cause mayhem, there are far easier ways of doing it than starting with a small blob of fat with water in it. You know, you could take an existing pathogen and boost it using genetics. You can make it more transmissible and all the rest of it. Don't give people too many ideas. No, but that is dangerous science. I think if you're starting with something like this, it's quite hard to see how you're going to cause any damage.

16:23Madeleine Finlay: But it's a good time to start thinking about it. And I put this to Kate because I was really keen to know what she was thinking about that. Anytime you're learning to engineer life on this most fundamental level, you're also creating an ability to misuse that technology. And that's been a big discussion in the field ever since synthetic biology started. And the same with spud cell. We have to keep it contained. We're engineering into it safeguards so that if it ever gets good enough to live on its own and gets released into the environment, it's not going to spread and do harm. and we're also engineering the kind of limitations so that it only can live in the lab.

17:07There is no way for it to kind of escape and live on its own. Ian, all of this work, it's really putting trust in scientists to do the right thing. And there is a question here about, you know, scientists playing God. Is this something that we should be worried about?

17:27Madeleine Finlay: That phrase playing God is inherently considered a bad thing to do, isn't it? And so what do we mean by playing God? I mean, if we're going to talk about, should we be trying to build life? Well, why not? Why wouldn't we want to know how chemicals assemble and become living? That's a really, really interesting question. These groups are a million miles away from creating even a living ball of gel, basically. We're a long way away from that. But even if they did have a living synthetic cell, we don't give rights to E. coli. We don't give rights to bacteria. We are killing them all the time whenever we put anything in the dishwasher or wash it.

18:11Madeleine Finlay: We are killing bacteria left, right and centre. And so I don't think we need to worry about rights at that sort of point. I think the concern, if any, is around can you make these things dangerous? But again, I'll go back to that point. Just start with something that's dangerous already. There's plenty of pathogens out there that are horrendously dangerous. You know, that's your starting point, not something that is basically a tiny water-filled football. Well, Ian, I've loved discussing this with you and hearing about this research. Thank you so much. You're welcome. Thanks again to Ian and to Professor Kate Ademala.

18:44You can read Ian's piece about spud cells on theguardian.com. And before you go, I want to recommend a brilliant video from our explainer series, It's Complicated. It's all about how marketing can trick us into mistaking ultra-processed foods for health foods. It's definitely worth a watch. And we've put a link on today's episode page, or just search It's Complicated from The Guardian on YouTube. And that's it for today. This episode was produced by me, Madeleine Finlay. It was sound designed by Josh and Chana. And the executive producer is Ellie Burie. We'll be back on Tuesday. See you then.

19:32Madeleine Finlay: This is The Guardian.