"According to NASA's Definition of Life, I'm Not Alive" - Why Nobody Can Define Life | Dr. Kate Adamala

That just shows you that there is really no good definition of life. In your world, life is not clearly defined. I think NASA has a working definition, self sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution. That's a fantastic definition, but according to that definition of life, I'm not alive. The fact that we don't fully understand life right now doesn't mean to me that there's something that we're unable to understand. It just means we lack data at this point. You can create spud cells that feed on carbon in the air. Is that what you're talking about? I'm mostly talking about the molecules. We need a way to make all the molecules that our civilization uses right now. If you put molecules under the right conditions in the right environment, they will start self assembling, and the emergent property of that assembly is what we call life. It's definitely a milestone, but it's not a mic drop. We're not done. We're showing that you can escape this gravity well of evolution. Could you, introduce yourself to listeners, give some of your background? I know I know that you've been working in those area for a while. You had Cinel's, I think they were called before spud cells. If you could give some of that background, and as I said, state what the goal of this research is. My name is Kate Ramala. I'm originally from Poland where I studied chemistry. Then I got my PhD in biophysics in Italy in Rome, and then I moved to The States for the other half of my PhD in origin of life and biophysics of origin of life. And then I did a brief stint in neurobiology, synthetic neurobiology, as a postdoc. That taught me a lot. One of the things that it did teach me is that I don't like neurobiology, and I don't wanna work on that. So when I started my own lab, I wanted to continue the practical applicability of research that I picked up during my neuro biology work. I wanted to know that my research, the things that I'm doing are actually good for something, but I was really drawn to go back to my roots to work on something as cool as origin of life as astrobiology. So I basically wanted to combine that curiosity driven research that I've done in my early training with the practical biomedical economical applicability of the work that I learned during my postdoc. And that led me to synthetic biology and specifically synthetic cell engineering. And the overarching goal of my research is to make biology a general purpose technology. Right now, biology is very specific. We can make a lot of things with biology, but there are very specific things. And general purpose technology is something that you can pick up and apply to a new, direction, new application, new purpose without the need to reengineer the whole chassis. Like, I I can take my work computer …