Mindscape 56 | Kate Adamala on Creating Synthetic Life
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- čas přidán 29. 08. 2024
- Blog post with audio player, show notes, and transcript: www.prepostero...
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Scientists can’t quite agree on how to define “life,” but that hasn’t stopped them from studying it, looking for it elsewhere, or even trying to create it. Kate Adamala is one of a number of scientists engaged in the ambitious project of trying to create living cells, or something approximating them, starting from entirely non-living ingredients. Impressive progress has already been made. Designing cells from scratch will have obvious uses is biology and medicine, but also allow us to build biological robots and computers, as well as helping us understand how life could have arisen in the first place, and what it might look like on other planets.
Katarzyna (Kate) Adamala received her Ph.D. working with Pier Luigi Luisi at the University of Rome and Jack Szostak at Harvard. She is currently an assistant professor of Genetics, Cell Biology, and Development at the University of Minnesota. She is a member of the Build-A-Cell international collaboration, which brings together multiple groups to work on constructing artificial life.
I could listen to Kate Adamala talk for days 😊
excellent guest, witty and informative.
And so cool !
In the book Rendezvous with Rama, an alien spaceship is populated by a crew of non-sentient biological robots called "biots." They are synthetic organisms constructed to maintain the spaceship interior. For example, a crab-like species of biot patrols the ground and breaks down any garbage or waste, drops it into a "lake" (in the ship's biosphere), where it is then devoured and dissolved by aquatic biots.
Delightful. And thank you, Kate, for using 'sapience' when discussing intelligence in ET. It's a given that ET will be sentient...just like every living thing on Earth is sentient. The truly interesting thing to think about is their level of sapience.
"The nation state is the measles of humanity." - Albert Einstein "We must become global citizens." - Stephen Hawking
@Cosmic Landscape Global direct democracy above Nation States with Internet voting perfectly counters the "economic anarchy of (global) capitalism" Albert Einstein
Direct democracy proved a failure over 2 millennia ago in Greece. Rome created indirect democracy to greater success, which evolved back into an autocracy.
If anyone was interested in the point raised at about 41 minutes in about simulating the function of a protein from its DNA sequenz: there are programs that compare the sequence of a gene (or the actual sequence of amino acids of the protein) of unknown function to a database of gene sequences of proteins of known function. With high enough similarity of the sequences compared these programs are very good at assigning functions to proteins of unkown function.
Simulating the function of a protein from its DNA sequenz however not possible at the moment, not only but also because its very hard to predict how a protein will fold.
One of my favorites, great quality all around.
From my Google research, the smallest known self-sufficient genome is about 1.1 million bases.
She is Tali from Mass effect universe, voice and ideas amazing
She's great! Good interview
26:57 regarding why life on Earth uses those 4 specific DNA nucleobases, there's a very interesting talk on the CfA Colloquium channel, titled "Stellar UV Light and the Origins of Life".
If I understood the upshot of the talk, the reason why A/T/C/G bases ended up being used is a selection effect due to UV radiation of the early sun. When in water solution, those 4 bases are apparently something like 3 orders of magnitude faster to de-excite after absorbing a UV photon which makes them significantly more photostable than other potential bases that are more likely to get destroyed by that absorbed photon.
Thanks, sounds interesting
Never thought I'd hear a biologist explain to a physicist where we're at for extraplanetary spectroscopy.
Awesome discussion!! Good one, Sean! Yuval Harari would be great as well.
Love these Podcasts! It'll be great if there was a video. It's easier to follow and makes it more interesting and dynamic(like JRE or Lex Fridman).
Ribosomes are NOT CRAPPY! please dont say that again. They make my proteins. And they are fantastic!
I'm pretty sure she said cribby
@@origins7298 nope! It was a clear CRAPPY.
@@misbahkhanmd5226 how can you be so sure? After all I don't think English is her first language. She had a pretty strong accent. Kribi means selective. I think she was saying the ribosomes are chemically selectively.
@@misbahkhanmd5226 "For example, amino-acid misincorporations during translation are estimated to occur once in every 1,000 to 10,000 codons translated1,2. At this error rate, 15% of average-length protein molecules will contain at least one misincorporated amino acid.", a worse error rate than Dunkin' Donuts (13.1%)
In Craig Venter's synthetic life, they actually discarded some of the transposon mutants that were strictly viable, but had extremely long cell division times (IIRC taking more than 8 hours for a single cell division). So at least some of the "absolutely required for life" genes they found, aren't REALLY absolutely required for life, they just make it very difficult to do growth and competition experiments because the cells without those genes have extremely low competitive fitness because of looooong generation times, and so are difficult to work with.
Fascinating Ep , Thanks!
I think the most difficult part of biological chemistry (organic to purists, I would broaden to electrodynamics in general) is nature’s advantage of having the power of numbers, given the scale of her chemistry set, the ability to propose billions upon billions of failed solutions at any given moment coupled with millions of years of trying. Brute force computing or empirical experimentation to stumble upon the the solution seems rather daunting. Although I’m sure the solution is ultimately lacking any undo complexity; it’s the pursuit of the simple solution that leads to one’s insanity.
Semi living matter... sounds like zombies to me. Zombie matter? I imagine a future where self driving electric cars navigate down zombie roads that maintain and repair themselves.
I don’t think it’s easy getting Issac Arthur in any podcast being that he has over a million subs.
Craig Venter commented in the past how available, increasing computer power (at a substantially lower cost) greatly accelerated his efforts at his institute. I would be interested to know how quantum computing or, other likely information processing advancements, accelerate efforts in synthetic life, biocomputing healthcare engineering in the next ten years.
hmmm... pancakes @29:11
"Hypozoic" could be a Greek origin term for half-life organisms at 54:55'
Yes.
Life but not as we know it.
Crappy is the word
lol, I came to youtube just because I was curious if any commenter would reference this, thanks.
cancer sounds like it's the backbone just some of the other parts which evolved upon it from a certain point have died ?????break in symmetry???
Build a cell workshop. By Sean Carroll
As soon as I complete my Build a Bear workshop with my grandkids, this goes on my list.
At end, "when we visit other solar systems" ?!? How can scientists say such nonchalantly? The distances are so vast, travel a million years to get somewhere?? Its crazy. Please give me an answer.
You are giving false hope and an excuse to destroy this planet. It short circuits my brain. I want an answer scientists!
As long as we don't destroy ourselves or get destroyed by an outside force, we WILL eventually go to another Solar System. I don't see how saying so is false hope... I also don't know how anything said is an "excuse to destroy this planet". That doesn't seem logical.
From what we currently know about physics, you are right that the distances are vast and would require a great amount of time to traverse. But generational spacecraft that use renewable energy sources of some kind could definitely lead to the spread of humanity across the galaxy---or some form of humanity, anyway. Considering the impact we have had on Earth, I'm not sure that'd necessarily be a "good" thing. But if we ever get to that point, I think we probably would have globally gotten our s*** together.
I enjoyed the conversation but there are many problems with her views.
I’ll just try to paraphrase the difference like this, the synthetic life we have created is as basic as a stone tool from millions of years ago to that of the LHC.
She overstated what we know. We know A LOT but so much less than she makes it sound.
Dogs? What about Raccoons?
Massive bruh moment
Pancake life 😊
Gaseous lifeforms... disperse!
First?!
Pseudo life
Para-living