About this episode

Dr. Kate Adamala discusses the creation of synthetic cells and the implications for defining life and biosecurity.

Nobody has ever built a cell from scratch - assembled entirely from purified molecules on a shelf - that can feed itself, grow, and split into daughter cells through its own genetic activity. Until now. Dr. Kate Adamala, a synthetic biologist and a professor of genetics at the University of Minnesota, whose lab just published a landmark paper on what she calls "spud cells," joins Craig Smith to explain what her team built, why it matters, and what it will take to go from proof of concept to a platform that could eventually replace every molecule civilization currently extracts from petrochemicals. The conversation is as philosophically rich as it is technically specific: Adamala argues that life has no magic ingredient, and that the universe itself is predisposed to give rise to it. She describes the spud cell not as a mic drop but as biology's Sputnik moment: proof that you can escape the gravity well of evolution and build lifelike systems from the ground up. The episode also covers the most alarming biosecurity question in synthetic biology right now: mirror life - cells built from mirror-image molecules that would be invisible to every immune system on earth and potentially…

More episodes of Eye On A.I.

• 6 in 10 Enterprises Can't Find the Root Cause When Their AI Workloads Fail | Paul Appleby, Virtana · July 15, 2026 · 45 min
• Inside the Enterprise Browser Rebuilding Security for the AI Era | Bradon Rogers, Island · July 13, 2026 · 56 min
• What Industrial AI Actually Looks Like | Kriti Sharma, Nexus Black · July 10, 2026 · 23 min
• The Biggest AI Security Problem Isn't the Model. It's This. | Devvret Rishi · July 7, 2026 · 48 min
• Big Pharma Fails 50% of the Time in Phase Three. AI Can Fix That | Vin Singh, BullFrog AI · July 5, 2026 · 50 min
• AI Agents Are Failing and It's Almost Never the Model's Fault | Alberto Pan, Denodo · July 2, 2026 · 42 min

Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the Eye On A.I. podcast page.