Can synthetic cells save the world?

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Associate professor Kate Adamala has been busy. Her lab at the University of Minnesota takes chemicals and dead, isolated biological parts — like DNA, membranes, ribosomes — and puts them together into “synthetic” cells to see if they will come to life…or at least act alive.

This summer, Adamala’s lab had a tremendous breakthrough. They made synthetic cells that can feed, grow, and divide. She decided to name them SpudCells, and says that they prove that one day building a fully living lab-made cell will be possible.

Adamala’s dream, and the dream of other synthetic biologists like her, is to make all the medicine, materials, and fuel we need with synthetic cells like these. Instead of relying endlessly on petrochemicals, Adamala believes we could program cells to generate these materials in a lab for a more self-reliant and renewable future.

As Adamala explains: “I live in the Midwest, so we’ve got a lot of prairie grass. Why can’t I take that prairie grass and ferment it into a plastic toy? It’s totally possible. The atoms are there. We just…don’t have a living organism that would be willing and able to do that.” The synthetic cell could eventually be that organism.

Living cells can move atoms around with pinpoint precision without creating a lot of toxic waste along the way. The only problem is that natural biological cells are too hard to control.

Scientists still don’t actually understand how natural cells do everything they can do. “I’m scared of cells,” Adamala says. “I don’t believe that we’ll ever be able to understand a complex living cell. So my approach is I think we can build ourselves a cell.”

For Unexplainable’s three-part Life From Scratch series, I spoke with some of the leading voices of synthetic cell biology. From making the world’s first living cell with synthetic DNA to racing to build safeguards against a technology that could kill the world, this series explores the potential promise and scary risks of synthetic cell biology.

Below is an excerpt of my conversation with Adamala about her lab’s big breakthrough, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast — and the whole series — so listen to Unexplainable wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more. You can also watch a video version of this conversation on Netflix.

We made a cell that can feed, grow, and divide out of nonliving, chemical components. People have been making cells from dead chemicals for a long time now, but none of them were able to realize those key functions of life. This is the first time synthetic cells have been able to grow and replicate based on their own instructions.

Before, we could make a synthetic cell and tell it to grow by adding things to it, but the SpudCells grow because they feel like it, because the proteins inside them tell them to grow.