Manuel Porcar • Juli Peretó

2014

From iGEM to the Artificial Cell

In his enlightening Letters to a Young Scientist (2013) myrmecologist and sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson beautifully describes three different archetypes of the scientific mind. The creative life of a scientist could be oriented to a travel into unexplored regions (e.g., the detailed molecular cartography of a cell or the most remote galaxies), a fight against evil (e.g., the great health afflictions or the shortage in energy sources), and a kind of Grail Quest. Among the extraordinary search of a real grail Wilson proposes “the creation in the laboratory of a simple organism.” It is hard not to agree that this experiment could be the most intellectually shocking in human history: a second example of life in our hands.