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

What It Covers

Dr. Kate Adamala, synthetic cell engineer at the University of Minnesota, explains how her lab built "spud cells" — synthetic lipid vesicles containing purified biological molecules capable of genetically encoded feeding and division, representing a platform to make biology a general-purpose manufacturing technology for medicine and climate solutions.

Key Questions Answered

• •Synthetic cell architecture: Spud cells consist of purified bacterial proteins, small molecules, DNA plasmids, and E. coli-derived ribosomes and tRNA, all encapsulated in a lipid vesicle. The cell expresses surface proteins that recruit external vesicles containing nutrients, enabling genetically encoded feeding — analogous to a bird opening its mouth to signal hunger.
• •Ribogenesis bottleneck: The single largest unsolved problem in synthetic cell engineering is ribogenesis — assembling functional ribosomes from their component parts. All required proteins can be expressed and combined, yet they fail to form active ribosomes. The assembly must occur sequentially during synthesis, not after, and the precise ordering remains unknown.
• •Scalable drug manufacturing pathway: Spud cells can already be programmed to express proteins using non-canonical amino acids, making them candidates for high-value therapeutics that standard organisms cannot produce. The current bottleneck is not programming but robust replication at scale — once efficient division is achieved, cells could secrete drug proteins directly into growth media for purification.
• •Evolution requires scale, not magic: Spud cells currently require artificially introduced mutations because spontaneous mutations need enormous population volumes to arise reliably. At primordial-ocean scale over millions of years, spontaneous evolution would occur naturally. AI-assisted computational modeling of molecular interactions is being developed to accelerate iteration cycles without requiring biological timescales.
• •Mirror life represents a hard biosecurity line: Mirror cells — built from enantiomers opposite to all natural biological molecules — could evade immune systems and replicate undetected in ecosystems. A 2024 research moratorium halted all major mirror-life programs globally. Spud cells do not advance this risk because they use natural enantiomers and provide no pathway to sourcing mirror ribosomes.