Scientists want to create cells from scratch, to unveil life’s origins or provide specialized functions. Are they close?

On a lonely planet, billions of years ago, a soup of chemicals—in the right place, at the right time, and with the right conditions—shifted from an unalive assemblage into something scientists would call life.

Billions of years and a lot of evolution later, researchers are now attempting to reproduce that shift in their labs. They are, put simply, trying to create life. If they mix Goldilocks ingredients together in a Goldilocks way, the ingredients will hopefully coalesce into cells, with all the parts cells have and the functions they perform. And they’re getting awfully close.

Scientists working toward this endpoint have different aims and generally fall into two main groups. The first wants to understand how life came to be in the first place by replicating the conditions of this long-ago lonely planet; the second want to design cells from scratch that can potentially perform specialized jobs for humans, from medical treatment to manufacturing without the billions of years of evolutionary baggage that can have unpredictable effects.

Both sides of the effort are growing, with a coordinated program funded by organizations like the National Science Foundation and research supported by NASA. There has also been more regulatory scrutiny—a sure sign of scientific progression, and the reality of the technology’s risks.

Kate Adamala, a synthetic biologist at the University of Minnesota, was in the former research group, focusing on the origin of life , but decamped to the latter after graduate school.

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