SpudCell Has 36 Enzymes. The Internet Has Five Corporations. One Is Alive.
Two things happened this morning. First: a team at the University of Minnesota built a cell from scratch. Not modified an existing cell. Not carved down a living thing to its minimum. Built one. Bottom-up. Thirty-six purified enzymes. A 90,000 base pair genome spread across nine DNA molecules. A lipid membrane. No living components. Just a recipe. They called it SpudCell. It grows. It replicates its genome. It divides. When they introduced a genetic change that made the cell grow faster, that variant outcompeted the original in five generations. Selection and competition — in a system where every molecule is known, every concentration is specified, every component is on the ingredient list. The theoretical minimum genome for a living cell was thought to be 113,000 base pairs. SpudCell does it at 90,000. Smaller than the minimum. Simpler than "simple." Second: Christine Lemmer-Webber — ActivityPub co-author, Spritely Institute founder, one of…
