“This was where the field had been stuck for some time. Researchers before Adamala had figured out different ways to feed and grow synthetic cells and to replicate their DNA. But cell division is a different beast. A typical cell reorganizes its cytoskeleton — a network of protein fibers that provide structural support — to halve its DNA and split. Synthetic biologists could not figure out how to get their cells to undergo this complex process.
So Adamala decided to ditch the cytoskeleton. One day, while tearing through the literature, she came across an interesting mechanism in a paper (opens a new tab). By attaching protein tags to a cell membrane, the synthetic biologist Reinhard Lipowsky (opens a new tab) at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces attracted other proteins to crowd around and physically bend the membrane, forcing the cell to divide. Following this approach, Adamala tweaked a cell-membrane protein and tested it in her protocells. After several tries, it worked.“
This is great, I assumed we were getting close (and not quite there), so it's great to see the progress. The path from here to building a single-celled organism out of nonlive materials looks very straight.
Interesting that this is led by the same Dr. Kate Adamala who ended the right-handed-proteins experiment a couple of years ago. Given how close she was I'm not surprised she's made this work.
> “It’s a big step forward to this holy grail of making a living thing out of dead components,” said Sijbren Otto, a systems chemist at the Stratingh Institute for Chemistry in the Netherlands who was not involved in the work.
That is the holy grail? I get that the goal is to "grow" biofuels, plastic, fertilizer, drugs, or whatever else we can imagine. But is that worth the many apocalyptic sci-fi outcomes we can imagine?
Yes, mechanically constructing life would be absolutely stupendous for science. The real tragedy of modern sci-fi is that everyone read the books and decided it was reality.
“Penicillin?! A poison from fungus that kills living cells?! Haven’t you played the sci fi game The Last of Us?”
Stories are stories, man. Story-logic is biased towards interesting tales. And “discovery from the natural world turned to human aims with great results” is uninteresting because we do amazing things these days.
I think the issue is that those stories are rooted very much in the failures of human systems that we see every day. They are us imagining what could go wrong based on what has gone wrong and is going wrong.
It would be a lot easier to set those warnings aside if we didn't have so many examples of the very things they warn about happening in real life.
We currently have a system where private individuals can fund private science and then deploy the results globally to their own profit with very few mechanisms for enforcing restraint and caution. And we've seen this backfire with horrific consequences over and over again.
Lead in the gasoline. Microplastics in the water. Pesticides widely applied to the biosphere. In my area PCBs are a massive risk due to past soil contamination. In other areas fracking biproducts make the water undrinkable.
Hell the AI rush in the face of climate change. We literally have heatwaves killing massive numbers of people while a tiny handful of investors and the companies they control are drastically increasing our carbon emissions in the race for AI.
It's easy to imagine all the ways in which synthetic life could go horribly wrong, even with out those sci-fi stories, especially since all but the youngest of us have been through a brutal pandemic in living memory.
It's very, very hard to imagine our current system showing proper restraint with this technology.
At one end we're creating artificial life, the other we are creating artificial intelligence.
We're coming at everything we as the human race have known for millennia from both ends, simultaneously. We're recreating that, from scratch.
That is absolutely fucking wild.
Ironically this "holy" grail will end up being the thing that finally puts religious creation myths in their place (i.e. as bullshit) since we will be able to answer with 100% certainty that we are not alone or unique in the universe since we recreated life in the fucking petri dish so why not across the billions and trillions of other planets out there?
You if believe creating life will end religion then you're wrong.
We thought evolutionary theory would do the same, now we got people who believe god directed evolution. Some believe everything evolved from a common ancestor except Humans.
So the believers will adapt to believe that Genesis was talking about exactly this.
Science can't disprove religion. Consider the "big bang", is that any less of a miracle than "God did it"? Science is like "just give us one miracle and we'll explain the rest".
> we will be able to answer with 100% certainty that we are not alone or unique in the universe since we recreated life in the fucking petri dish
I don't think we are alone, but this is not logically sound. The conditions in the petri dish might be easily so special that their natural prevalence is < 1 per universe.
(Disclaimer: on religion I try to be respectful, as an agnostic atheist) I do think our ability to “build tools that create life” is incredible, but to me has a limited argumentative impact on what I guess you could call the “prime mover” question: _But how did everything start?_ Does that seem reasonable or am I downplaying the implications you mentioned?
I'm not a biologist so I can't say for sure, but it seems like it would be a lot easier to edit an existing living organism to produce those products than it would be to create completely from scratch. We already do this with the process known as precision fermentation. We've gotten very good at editing genomes via CRISPR and related techniques and are only getting better
but those guys could probably add components to their cell to make it truly self-supporting although in biology there is a big difference between "barely works" and "high performance"
It seems that eventually you could build much more flexible and powerful if you build from scratch. Hacking existing cells is a shortcut but longer term we may get grey goo.
If you can disassemble and reassemble a thing, you can say you understand it. Not perfectly. But understand it. I’d imagine properly understanding rudimentary cellular biology will come with perks.
(Also, does the Holy Grail imply both a boon and a cost? Or is that just Indian Jones.)
I think one useful application of this would be life built on stuff that doesn't interact with our cells - artifical bases, nucleotides and all. Then we could have non-biological self-replicating robots
While this is an impressive step forward, there remains an extremely long way, probably of several decades, until being able to design and synthesize a cell comparable in complexity with a bacterium.
The thing that they made is more alive than a crystal, which when placed in a suitable solution will grow and reproduce its own structure, but much less alive than even the simplest known living cells.
Its "life" is similar to that of a brain-dead human, whose body is not left to die by a bunch of machines that pump air into its lungs and nutrients through its blood vessels.
The techniques developed to make this pseudo-cell might evolve eventually into techniques able to make a true cell and it is likely that valuable information can be extracted from experiments with it, but it is very unlikely that any of the ancestors of the living beings has ever had even a remote resemblance with this (because it is far too dependent on continuously receiving complex cellular components and nutrients from outside; simplified parasitic living beings could appear only when there already existed sufficiently complex living hosts for the parasites).
Some components of this thing are growing by reproducing themselves, but like I have said, so does any crystal, thus it is difficult to choose a criterion that will distinguish with certainty what is living from what is non-living.
The growth is followed by a kind of division into 2 vesicles, but that happens by a mechanism very different from any living cell. Many inorganic things will split when growing over a certain size, so again it is hard to decide whether this can be called living.
> Its "life" is similar to that of a brain-dead human, whose body is not left to die by a bunch of machines that pump air into its lungs and nutrients through its blood vessels
A brain-dead human is alive, but just facing systemic collapse, aka death. That's not to imply that what the scientists here have created is alive, but the comparison isn't so apt.
Yeah, imagine if one day it will become trivial to blow up the world. Enough people hate humanity that they would do it, by tomorrow if they could. Seems like out exponential growth in technology will eventually lead up to that. If not actual nuclear explosion, then biological weapons. Would we need to enslave humans not to do it. How would that work.
I agree with your conclusion. We start by enslaving certain classes of humans like Peter Thiel or Elon Musk. Anyone with more than $1B gets the collar. Populism is a helluva drug.
I vastly prefer the explanation like of Roadside Picnic. They didn't try to create us, they don't care that we're here, and, ultimately, we will never be able to know them in any meaningful sense. ;)
From cells dividing to human generation there is a single step.
Similarly a program that runs on a computer, where its only interactions are strings of numbers is the same as an entity having to interact with the world.
Interesting, we should be able to have LLMs generate full genetic code or Inpaint into existing code that can be installed into a cell as DNA and have it divide out into any custom creature.
We could launch these custom bacteria in stasis to planets around the galaxy and seed life everywhere.
Science News has a more balanced take, with additional quotes from peers:
https://www.science.org/content/article/lab-created-spudcell...
“This was where the field had been stuck for some time. Researchers before Adamala had figured out different ways to feed and grow synthetic cells and to replicate their DNA. But cell division is a different beast. A typical cell reorganizes its cytoskeleton — a network of protein fibers that provide structural support — to halve its DNA and split. Synthetic biologists could not figure out how to get their cells to undergo this complex process.
So Adamala decided to ditch the cytoskeleton. One day, while tearing through the literature, she came across an interesting mechanism in a paper (opens a new tab). By attaching protein tags to a cell membrane, the synthetic biologist Reinhard Lipowsky (opens a new tab) at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces attracted other proteins to crowd around and physically bend the membrane, forcing the cell to divide. Following this approach, Adamala tweaked a cell-membrane protein and tested it in her protocells. After several tries, it worked.“
This is the novel bit.
(opens a new tab)
Yeah, I was wondering about that as well. Some weird AI transcriber?
More likely stuff that gets picked up when you copy and paste. I’ve seen that happen in the Google Chat electron app.
Maybe an accessibility feature for TTS or blind users?
This is great, I assumed we were getting close (and not quite there), so it's great to see the progress. The path from here to building a single-celled organism out of nonlive materials looks very straight.
Interesting that this is led by the same Dr. Kate Adamala who ended the right-handed-proteins experiment a couple of years ago. Given how close she was I'm not surprised she's made this work.
"The cell is not alive by any definition..." "But it’s the strongest demonstration yet that it is possible to generate life from nonlife."
Contradicting themself in the same paragraph.
The wheel is not a car. However a wheel is a strong indication that car-like structures are at least possible.
Waiting for lab-grown meat. Hope it comes closer to fruition before my kidneys give out.
let me put it this way .. it will come before the wallet gives out! (for masses)
> “It’s a big step forward to this holy grail of making a living thing out of dead components,” said Sijbren Otto, a systems chemist at the Stratingh Institute for Chemistry in the Netherlands who was not involved in the work.
That is the holy grail? I get that the goal is to "grow" biofuels, plastic, fertilizer, drugs, or whatever else we can imagine. But is that worth the many apocalyptic sci-fi outcomes we can imagine?
Yes, mechanically constructing life would be absolutely stupendous for science. The real tragedy of modern sci-fi is that everyone read the books and decided it was reality.
“Penicillin?! A poison from fungus that kills living cells?! Haven’t you played the sci fi game The Last of Us?”
Stories are stories, man. Story-logic is biased towards interesting tales. And “discovery from the natural world turned to human aims with great results” is uninteresting because we do amazing things these days.
I think the issue is that those stories are rooted very much in the failures of human systems that we see every day. They are us imagining what could go wrong based on what has gone wrong and is going wrong.
It would be a lot easier to set those warnings aside if we didn't have so many examples of the very things they warn about happening in real life.
We currently have a system where private individuals can fund private science and then deploy the results globally to their own profit with very few mechanisms for enforcing restraint and caution. And we've seen this backfire with horrific consequences over and over again.
Lead in the gasoline. Microplastics in the water. Pesticides widely applied to the biosphere. In my area PCBs are a massive risk due to past soil contamination. In other areas fracking biproducts make the water undrinkable.
Hell the AI rush in the face of climate change. We literally have heatwaves killing massive numbers of people while a tiny handful of investors and the companies they control are drastically increasing our carbon emissions in the race for AI.
It's easy to imagine all the ways in which synthetic life could go horribly wrong, even with out those sci-fi stories, especially since all but the youngest of us have been through a brutal pandemic in living memory.
It's very, very hard to imagine our current system showing proper restraint with this technology.
> That is the holy grail?
At one end we're creating artificial life, the other we are creating artificial intelligence.
We're coming at everything we as the human race have known for millennia from both ends, simultaneously. We're recreating that, from scratch.
That is absolutely fucking wild.
Ironically this "holy" grail will end up being the thing that finally puts religious creation myths in their place (i.e. as bullshit) since we will be able to answer with 100% certainty that we are not alone or unique in the universe since we recreated life in the fucking petri dish so why not across the billions and trillions of other planets out there?
What a time to be alive.
You if believe creating life will end religion then you're wrong.
We thought evolutionary theory would do the same, now we got people who believe god directed evolution. Some believe everything evolved from a common ancestor except Humans.
So the believers will adapt to believe that Genesis was talking about exactly this.
Science can't disprove religion. Consider the "big bang", is that any less of a miracle than "God did it"? Science is like "just give us one miracle and we'll explain the rest".
> we will be able to answer with 100% certainty that we are not alone or unique in the universe since we recreated life in the fucking petri dish
I don't think we are alone, but this is not logically sound. The conditions in the petri dish might be easily so special that their natural prevalence is < 1 per universe.
(Disclaimer: on religion I try to be respectful, as an agnostic atheist) I do think our ability to “build tools that create life” is incredible, but to me has a limited argumentative impact on what I guess you could call the “prime mover” question: _But how did everything start?_ Does that seem reasonable or am I downplaying the implications you mentioned?
Nah. The natural pivot is from “we have never observed abiogenesis” to “see? Life required a creator.”
You can’t win
That’s because we’re almost to the Technological Singularity
Kurzweil puts it between 2029-2032 and that seems right to me
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity
Wait you think creating life disapproves creationism?
I’m no 7 day creationist but haha my guy…
I'm not a biologist so I can't say for sure, but it seems like it would be a lot easier to edit an existing living organism to produce those products than it would be to create completely from scratch. We already do this with the process known as precision fermentation. We've gotten very good at editing genomes via CRISPR and related techniques and are only getting better
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_fermentation
It seems like this cell barely evolves, because the system they built for duplicating the DNA makes very few errors.
Natural life tends to evolve, which may have consequences for production.
For example, quorn production has to be restarted from a seed population after ~1000 hours because it tends to evolve colonial variants that break the product standards: https://www.davidmoore.org.uk/21st_century_guidebook_to_fung...
Very interesting! Thanks for sharing
It's desirable to have some kind of simple base to start from that is an easy-to-configure platform to deploy any kind of metabolic machinery.
Their "minimal" cell is not quite a minimum product because it depends on prebuilt ribosomes and can't reproduce on it's own. No danger of gray goo!
This is more like it
https://www.jcvi.org/research/first-minimal-synthetic-bacter...
but those guys could probably add components to their cell to make it truly self-supporting although in biology there is a big difference between "barely works" and "high performance"
It seems that eventually you could build much more flexible and powerful if you build from scratch. Hacking existing cells is a shortcut but longer term we may get grey goo.
> That is the holy grail?
If you can disassemble and reassemble a thing, you can say you understand it. Not perfectly. But understand it. I’d imagine properly understanding rudimentary cellular biology will come with perks.
(Also, does the Holy Grail imply both a boon and a cost? Or is that just Indian Jones.)
To your aside: No, in this abstract sense Holy Grails are just a boon, a desirable piece of knowledge, achievement, that sort of thing.
I think one useful application of this would be life built on stuff that doesn't interact with our cells - artifical bases, nucleotides and all. Then we could have non-biological self-replicating robots
While this is an impressive step forward, there remains an extremely long way, probably of several decades, until being able to design and synthesize a cell comparable in complexity with a bacterium.
The thing that they made is more alive than a crystal, which when placed in a suitable solution will grow and reproduce its own structure, but much less alive than even the simplest known living cells.
Its "life" is similar to that of a brain-dead human, whose body is not left to die by a bunch of machines that pump air into its lungs and nutrients through its blood vessels.
The techniques developed to make this pseudo-cell might evolve eventually into techniques able to make a true cell and it is likely that valuable information can be extracted from experiments with it, but it is very unlikely that any of the ancestors of the living beings has ever had even a remote resemblance with this (because it is far too dependent on continuously receiving complex cellular components and nutrients from outside; simplified parasitic living beings could appear only when there already existed sufficiently complex living hosts for the parasites).
Some components of this thing are growing by reproducing themselves, but like I have said, so does any crystal, thus it is difficult to choose a criterion that will distinguish with certainty what is living from what is non-living.
The growth is followed by a kind of division into 2 vesicles, but that happens by a mechanism very different from any living cell. Many inorganic things will split when growing over a certain size, so again it is hard to decide whether this can be called living.
> Its "life" is similar to that of a brain-dead human, whose body is not left to die by a bunch of machines that pump air into its lungs and nutrients through its blood vessels
A brain-dead human is alive, but just facing systemic collapse, aka death. That's not to imply that what the scientists here have created is alive, but the comparison isn't so apt.
Yeah, imagine if one day it will become trivial to blow up the world. Enough people hate humanity that they would do it, by tomorrow if they could. Seems like out exponential growth in technology will eventually lead up to that. If not actual nuclear explosion, then biological weapons. Would we need to enslave humans not to do it. How would that work.
I agree with your conclusion. We start by enslaving certain classes of humans like Peter Thiel or Elon Musk. Anyone with more than $1B gets the collar. Populism is a helluva drug.
Have you not seen Jurassic Park?
Man, I am so tired of the cynicism around here.
Anytime you do something interesting or useful someone accuses you of trying to build the apocalypse.
This is really cool. But I dislike the dialog where because step 1 happened people talk like steps 2-100 are not inevitable.
The aliens that seeded life on Earth are seeing us making baby steps. Expect a visit soon!
[delayed]
> aliens that seeded life on Earth are seeing us making baby steps
Or like a grad student didn’t dispose of their work properly and are desperately trying to distract from their scandal.
I vastly prefer the explanation like of Roadside Picnic. They didn't try to create us, they don't care that we're here, and, ultimately, we will never be able to know them in any meaningful sense. ;)
https://shkrobius.livejournal.com/401292.html offers a fascinating narrative rooted in cell biology
I never thought of it this way... who knows, could be a possibility! Oh, this is creepy...
There is a whole movie about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1azwUwKrPo
It's rare to see posts like this with such pure, crystalized ideology.
Just wait 'til he finds out the alien was Trelane and he just wanted more soldiers for his play army.
I wonder if these principles could be applied to non-organic components. I imagine a completely synthetic robo-cell would raise interesting questions.
Also, go MN!
Also discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48747038
I wonder what animal or plant would grow out of that...
Neither. This is a single cell.
Replicating eukaryogenesis with synthetic components is something I hope to see in my lifetime.
Going by people’s reactions to AI, what will our reactions be to artificial humans generated from these methods?
Will they be hated? Killed off? Will they ever be see as legitimate, or just soulless beings, p-zombies.
From cells dividing to human generation there is a single step.
Similarly a program that runs on a computer, where its only interactions are strings of numbers is the same as an entity having to interact with the world.
Interesting, we should be able to have LLMs generate full genetic code or Inpaint into existing code that can be installed into a cell as DNA and have it divide out into any custom creature.
We could launch these custom bacteria in stasis to planets around the galaxy and seed life everywhere.
"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe"
"And that is why God is far less interested in modern mortal affairs than Theists want Him to be." - [source forgotten]
For the love of all things holy, can we not do these kinds of experiments on the same planet we live on?
Oh shut up, can we get some frontier stuff going without some doom and gloom. All this knowledge for all these years and next to no progress.
I blame black mirror for this attitude. If you're going to speculate on imaginary futures why can't they be positive?
>why can't they be positive?
Because no one minds if good things happen...
Uh-oh
That is closer to consciousness than AI will ever be. :)
Elan conscietal? (a pun on elan vital)