Can We Build Life From Scratch? A First-of-Its-Kind Cell Is Raising New Questions About the Edge of Existence

9 min readHere’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:How scientists created synthetic cells from the bottom-up that can perform some of the same functions as natural cellsWhy these bioengineered organisms could help replace everything from jet fuel to synthetic fabrics with new chemicals by the 2050sIf these newly created cells could shed light on the mysteries of where life came from in the first placeIt was a sunny day on Stanford’s campus when, by Drew Endy’s reckoning, everything changed. During a May 2025 synthetic biology meeting that Endy, a synthetic biologist at Stanford, had co-organized, his friend and fellow researcher Kate Adamala pulled him aside to show him some of her lab’s recent results.Adamala, a synthetic biologist at the University of Minnesota, brought up six sequential images of a synthetic cell on her laptop screen; her lab had constructed it and coaxed it into carrying out some of the key functions of natural cells. With some assistance, the lab-made cells were able to make proteins based on instructions in their minimal genome, to copy the DNA in that genome, to package bits of that copied DNA in new cells.Endy believed Adamala’s results had revolutionized their field. During a recent Zoom call, he showed me why, sharing a video of one of his own lab’s projects, a perfectly round blob he says took six years to build. “This object is capable of expressing any DNA we add to it, and so since 2021 the puzzle was, what DNA do we add to this object to get it to grow and divide?” he says. “For about a decade I have been looking at objects like this that do not grow and divide,” so seeing Adamala’s cell, soon to be dubbed SpudCell, was “a holy moly moment,” he continues. Then, he flips to a slide with a picture of the Wright brothers’ airplane. It, too, was very limited, he notes. “It’s just barely a plane, and this is like, SpudCell’s just barely a cell. But it is.”Synthetic biology is where biology meets engineering, often in an attempt to design biological systems to perform functions natural life does not, such as churning out medications, fuels, and other useful chemicals. Adamala and Endy hope that in the coming decades, it will pave the way to a resilient world of abundance in which essential resources can be produced locally, anywhere. For them, SpudCell is the seed from which that vision can grow. Along the way, the synthetic cell is providing a new lens on what exactly life is.Adamala, Endy, and many other synthetic biologists believe their field will advance much faster if they work on a common system—picture many teams writing software for the same computer operating system, versus each having to build its own hardware and software from scratch. But prior to SpudCell, there’d been no such operating system for synthetic biologists to use. So the two began laying the groundwork to bring other synthetic biologists together to work on their own projects with SpudCell as a shared chassis, a project dubbed Biotic. Investor Chris Raggio agreed to provide $10 million as a philanthropic donation to the effort. Meanwhile, Adamala and her team continued working to improve SpudCell, and to publish a paper describing it.After a top journal rejected the manuscript—ironically enough, it was Cell—Adamala realized that Biotic’s timeline didn’t have room for the months required to go through the submission, peer review, and revision process again. So, she posted it online herself on the preprint server bioXriv, which doesn’t require peer review, and sent out a press release. “That was actually the hardest decision for me because I’ve never done a big deal about a preprint before I knew it’s going to get published,” she says. (The group has since re-submitted the paper for publication in a different journal.)Kate Adamala, Adamala LabFluorescent microscopy of SpudCell—a synthetic cell assembled entirely from non-living chemical components—undergoing division. The six frames show the cell elongating, pinching, and separating into two daughter cells. (Credit: Kate Adamala, Adamala Lab)The paper went live on the lab’s website the next day, on July 1, 2026. As the stories on SpudCell rolled in from the news—among them The New York Times (twice), CNN, STAT, and Science—Adamala was apprehensive. “Seriously every morning, I was waking up terrified that I’m going to see an email that points out the fatal flaw in the paper. That’s supposed to be the point of peer review, and now it was like publicly peer-reviewed. Everyone got to see it.” That email never came.Adamala grew up in a small town in Poland. She learned to pilot small planes before she learned to drive. Flying is a hobby, “but it’s also kind of a mindset to me,” Adamala says. “You think about safety, you think about ways to do things, and you also think about engineering even if you’re not an engineer.”In graduate school, Adamala worked on research questions related to how rudimentary life might have evolved on Earth—or elsewhere. But while the work gave her a conversation-starting answer to the “what do you do?” question at parties, she “thought it would be nice to do something useful for a change,” she says. Something that her grandma could use. So she completed a postdoc in synthetic neurobiology. “I learned that I don’t like neurobiology, but I did learn that I like doing useful things,” she continues.Adamala moved into synthetic biology, at first with the idea of using the field’s tools to modify naturally evolved life. But she soon adjusted course as she realized that biology is “such a black box. We don’t understand the whole cell,” she explains. To truly understand a cell and successfully engineer it, she decided, it would instead need to be built from the bottom up.“SpudCell’s just barely a cell. But it is.” Work on what would become the SpudCell began shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic. The project drew on components already developed in Adamala’s lab or by others, and included a cell membrane made of fat molecules surrounding a watery inside with a tiny, 36-gene genome and the specialized proteins needed to make new proteins based on the genes’ instructions. Putting it all together was a slow process of “trial and error—mostly error,” Adamala says. Her team developed a system for feeding the artificial cells the molecules they’d need to grow and carry out reactions, including fats and building blocks of DNA and proteins.Once that was working, “I was actually ready to call it a day,” Adamala says. “But then I got this idea of getting the replication to work and . . . that delayed everything again forever.” The ability to replicate itself—that is, to reproduce—would be a critical step toward making the SpudCell more lifelike. The team ended up adding specialized proteins to the cells’ environment that stuck to the cell membranes. When enough proteins stud the membrane, they repel each other, forcing part of the surface to bud off and form a new cell.By early 2024, images indicated that Adamala’s team was able to coax the cells through five cycles of growth and replication. But such visual data can be deceptive, so the team ran tests that allowed them to compare the amount of DNA the cells had started with to the amount after five generations. They showed the SpudCells really had been making copies of their own genomes. This was the moment, Adamala remembers, when she thought, “oh wow, this actually works.”The replication was far from perfect. The cell’s genome is split up into seven round segments called plasmids, each copied separately, and whether each of the daughter cells ended up with a complete set of these plasmids is a matter of chance. Another awkward feature of the cells is that they couldn’t make their own ribosomes, the crucial factories that churn out new proteins; those needed to be supplied via the feeding system.The system requires “very intensive cellular CPR,” notes Robert Dorit, an evolutionary biologist at Smith College who was not involved in the work. “They have to supply a lot of stuff from the outside. They have to create a set of very particular conditions, and those conditions need to be constantly reinforced.” Nevertheless, he says features such as the ability to divide and pass down genetic material make SpudCell a considerable advancement. Adamala’s group has, he says, “raised the bar for what they’re willing to call a minimal cell, and I think that’s really great.”At Biotic’s first meeting, its founders were looking to bring their colleagues together around SpudCell as a common system, to work on modules that can be added onto it while maintaining interoperability. Their vision is to achieve truly world-changing innovations via synthetic biology by 2050. One of these, according to Adamala, is replacing petrochemicals—everything from jet fuel to synthetic fabrics—with chemicals produced by engineered organisms, potentially remaking the world economy and slicing the cost of energy, fertilizer, and other products downstream from oil. Other possibilities are decentralizing production of food and medication. At the kickoff meeting, Adamala showed a slide with a hypothetical cell that would live inside a patient, producing a therapy when it receives a signal indicating illness.Not all synthetic biologists are in it for the applications—at least, not primarily. Some are pursuing questions about the very origins of life, much as Adamala did during her PhD work. Humans have long sought to understand what life is and what differentiates it from nonliving matter, says Roseanna Zia, an engineering professor at the University of Missouri. One approach to answering that question is to build life, she adds. “I want to build a computational model so that we can replicate whatever it is that makes things transition from the nonliving chemistry and physics to this thing that we call life.” Her group is also working on a model of SpudCell that could ultimately help other researchers to fine-tune the synthetic cell and design it to carry out the kind of functions Adamala envisions.It’s worth noting that not only has science yet to come up with a comprehensive mechanism for how life might have first arisen on Earth; there’s also disagreement over where exactly the line between life and non-life lies. In the wake of SpudCell’s unveiling, Adamala says she heard from many people who consider it to be alive. She disagrees. “Definitions of life are arbitrary,” Adamala says. Her own definition is more of a gut feeling than a scientific set of benchmarks, but by her reckoning, SpudCell is not (yet) alive because it’s not robust enough; it can only replicate a handful of times before it grinds to a halt.Orion Venero, Adamala LabA super-resolution image of SpudCell’s liposomes containing a genome and the molecular machinery to produce proteins from it. By mimicking the structure of natural cell membranes, liposomes allow scientists to encapsulate essential biomolecules, such as DNA, RNA, and enzymes, that are necessary to complete a full cell cycle. (Credit: Orion Venero, Adamala Lab)In addition to exactly what life is and how it came about, there’s the question of how it might have looked had it evolved differently at the start. Juan Pérez-Mercader, an astrobiologist at Harvard University, leads work to create systems that mimic functions of living organisms, entirely from nonbiological chemicals. The hope is that “the study of these very simple systems can lead you to understand better what to expect … in terms of potential life outside the Earth,” as well as from artificial life, he says.Of course, when many people think of human-made life, extraterrestrial microbes aren’t top of mind, much less visions of a petrochemical-free future of abundance. Start with Frankenstein’s monster and carry through to Jeff Goldblum intoning “Life finds a way” shortly before velociraptors and a T-rex break containment. For those keeping track of less cinematic “what if?” scenarios, there’s mirror life, the so-far-only-hypothesized prospect that cells could be built of biomolecules that are a flipped, mirror image of those in existing, natural life forms. Such organisms would evade detection by our non-mirror immune systems, the thinking goes, and easily kill us and wreak ecological havoc.What is needed to ensure the safety of synthetic biology work and head off bad actors who would use its technologies for ill? Several sessions at Biotic’s kickoff addressed this question. In one, Adamala said her group is “designing this technology with firewalls, with kill switches, with technologies that allow us to keep it safe from the beginning. So we’re not retrofitting safety.” Endy later acknowledged that “No answer relative to biosecurity today should be satisfying. We have not secured biology's domain.” Biotic won’t be able to do so alone, he added.Both Adamala and Endy prefer to focus their “what ifs” on the positive developments they see arising from the technology. Endy cites a survey of first-year Stanford undergraduates about how they expect humanity to be faring when they’re middle-aged, relative to today. “The majority of our students say the 2050s are going to be worse, and they have very limited confidence that any of the grown-ups are going to do anything that matters,” he says. “That’s unacceptable to me, and shame on us if we don’t act to bend the future toward something more positive.”Biotic has set a countdown to a target date of January 1, 2050, dubbed Bloomsday, to bring about a bioeconomy, in part to inspire people to take part in building that future. The name is a counter to the Doomsday Clock.“For the first time in modern history, we can practically imagine making things work really well,” Endy says. “And that’s going to be extraordinarily challenging to pull off, but not impossible.”Shawna Williams is a freelance writer and editor based in Queens, NY. Her work has appeared in publications including The Scientist, BioSpace, and Nautilus.