Atlantis Dispatch 018:

in which ATLANTIS contemplates inventing the (im)possible…

Photo: Dr. Steel and his Robo Band.

April 29, 2022

…begin transmission…

In the last few dispatches, Atlantis has been thinking about how we conjure possible worlds in the imagination. We’ve been reflecting on the fertility of Drake’s equation, on the multiverse, on multiple origins of life, on emergent economies and so on. The world of the imagination is populated with infinite possibilities! But what happens when we start to wonder which of those possibilities might be realized, and which ones cannot? In other words, what if we move from thought experiment to empirical experiment?

     From time to time at our home port, we get the chance to talk to scientists who put theoretical thinking to the test. 

One of the most difficult and age-old problems that our scientists are tackling of late concerns the various ways that life could arise. If life could originate more than once, and if scientists can produce it in a lab, then, bam, not only have we made a new life form, but also we’ve arrived at a far clearer idea about how life can emerge here or anywhere else. 

     To get our oars into the experiments, we turned to the annals of SFI meetings over the last two years to see what the experimentalists in the room have brewed up. 

Way back in February of 2021, in a meeting titled “The Actual and the Possible” Atlantis had the chance to eavesdrop on the work of two SFI collaborators, Kate Adamala and Lee Cronin, who ask, each in their own way, how life could unfurl in the lab. For Adamala, if we look at the ways synthetic life can emerge in the lab, we can better access the way that life likely originated on Earth. For Cronin, generating life in the lab can help us create new life forms, and hunt for extraterrestrial life across the universe.   

Adamala works with what she calls synthetic cells to try to figure out what the essential parameters and components of life might be. Two big questions lurk in the primordial foundations of her work. Can we learn about life’s origins on Earth by looking at components of life artificially in the lab? How would we even know if we have found the components of life? Or if we’ve made life?

So far, as Adamala explained in her 2021 talk, all of biology is based on a single sample, and we don’t know how to engineer life in that form. Meaning scientists don’t know how to engineer life in one of its most familiar forms: the cell, or any other form, for that matter. So instead of trying to create cells to see what life might look like in them, Adamala works with synthetic cells, cells that are not alive, made with dead components, to produce environments that allow her lab to investigate what is most essential to life as we know it. 

But why can’t we use living cells to do this work? Work with living cells (as opposed to synthetic cells) to look at life’s essentials, Adamala explains, poses several challenges. One problem is that that living cells tend to die as soon as one takes out life’s functional machinery. By creating synthetic cells, Adamala and her lab can create molecular environments that are sometimes subpar for life, but also keep the emergent structures functioning enough to permit controlled change. Synthetic cells also allow scientists to create similar experimental environments, so they are able to control what they add and remove. How many things can we remove, without killing the cell? How few things can we put into a cell, to bring it to life?

So how would Adamala or anyone working with synthetic cells know if they’d generated new life? Well, the problem, and the paradoxes abound. Even if we have the stuff of dead life creating synthetic life, isn’t that also a matter of creating life from the life we (sort of) know on an earth-life form creating a life form in the long line of life that stretches all the way back to LUCA? 

  For Adamala, synthetic cells may not solve the paradox, but they can illuminate something about life as we know it. Synthetic cells give scientists a little non-living structure, an incubator for seeing exactly, on a molecular level, the components of living systems. With that kind of clarity perhaps we might generate something like a table of biological elements, and with them, start working on the experiments that give us life anew. 

So Atlantis sailed on, away from Adamala’s synthetic cells, across the ocean, out near a peaty bog, where we found another fellow experimentalist in Lee Cronin, who is also deeply interested in living molecular structures. Cronin is the mind behind assembly theory, the idea that we can measure the intrinsic complexity of any given object, and determine whether it is the consequence of a living system, by looking at its molecular structure. At a certain level of molecular complexity, the probability that a given molecular structure is randomly formed goes to virtually nothing. If we can measure this complexity, and know what possible molecular combinations make for things that cross the complexity threshold, we can also have a better idea of the kinds of patterns that indicate life. 

And then, we can basically print it. 

Wait, what, Atlantis?

You read us right, reader. Cronin is up to more than theorizing. He built a robo-brigade to do weird chemistry discovery, with the aim of producing a novel life form in his lab. Instantiating the impossible or unimagined is no easy feat, it takes a lot of work and a lot of time. These so called “chemputers” can run day and night, potentially printing aliens (and actually printing literally any molecule you could ever want or need) and thereby freeing up the hands (and minds!) of the human chemists over in Glasgow to think even bigger, and whip up even more magic. 

You want a liquid brain? You got it! Hyper-battery? Sure, no problem. What if we put it all together into a mad Megazord of a science endeavor?! Use the flow batteries to power the chemical-computation-machines to teach the chemputers to print the aliens? Sounds crazy, but it is happening right now, just east of the Hebrides. A global announcement of a lab-manufactured life form is surely coming down the pike any day now. These chemputers can make it happen in a matter of minutes…

…or two years?

…umm, eleven something years?

…well, whenever Lee “gets the chemistry right.”

Back to the point. Here, in empirical imagination land, cross pollination and collaboration is key. Experiment proves theory, yes, but an applied theory can prove an experiment, too. Even if Kate is approaching the make-life challenge in a vastly different way than Lee is, if Kate’s little synth-cells begin to seem lifelike, AssembLee can verify it. 

Now, we don’t know about you, but for Atlantis, this starts to sound a little Genesis-y. And no, we’re not talking Peter Gabriel or Phil Collins. Are these scientists, who tend in general not to be very into God, imitating gods themselves? And for that matter what book are we in? If the laws of life are written in the language of molecular machinery, Atlantis wonders how far the power lies in human hands to apply those laws and make life anew. Who are we kidding, we’re all for it! Atlantis loves gods, all kinds! 

…end transmission…

See what Kate, Lee, and other heroes of the Origins of Life League think about seeding the universe with life in SFI’s “The Andromeda Strain and the Meaning of Life” series.