Chemistry Coding the SpudCell 🥔

This week, researchers at the University of Minnesota announced something that genuinely stopped me mid-scroll. A team led by Associate Professors Kate Adamala and Aaron Engelhart built the world's first synthetic cell with a complete life cycle — not modified from an existing organism, not borrowed from biology. Built. From. Scratch.

They're calling it SpudCell.

It can grow. It feeds. It copies its own genetic material. It divides into new cells. And it does all of this from a starting point of pure chemistry — non-living components assembled with intent.

Adamala put it plainly: "We've replicated in chemistry what only used to be possible in biology: the complete set of behaviors of a cell. It proves that the most fundamental functions of life, like growth and replication, do not need a mysterious magical spark." —

The cell mostly resembles a basic bacterium in its behavior, but it carries none of evolution's baggage. No millions of years of accumulated quirks. No legacy code. Just the essential machinery for life's core functions, assembled on purpose.

Yuval Elani, a synthetic biology researcher at Imperial College London, framed it this way: "Building a cell from scratch means you are no longer tied to the constraints and evolutionary baggage of natural biology. It opens up the possibility of designing systems and programming them to do things that living cells may not do easily, or may not do at all." —

Programming Biology and Coding Machines — Two Worlds, One Language

Here's what hits differently when you look at SpudCell through the lens of software: Adamala didn't discover this cell. She wrote it.

She had a blueprint. An ingredient list. A modular system where components can be swapped in and out like dependencies in a codebase. The language she used — ingredients, concentrations, encoded instructions — is the language of programming, applied to living matter.

That parallel isn't accidental. Biology was always running code. DNA is a four-character instruction set. Proteins are the compiled output. Cellular behavior is what happens when that program executes in a wet, chemical environment. What SpudCell does is strip away the billions of years of legacy code evolution left behind and ask: what's the minimum viable program for life?

Developers already think this way. You don't need a monolithic framework to ship something real. You need the core functions, cleanly written, doing exactly what they're supposed to do.

SpudCell is biology's first truly open source cell — authored from scratch, with no proprietary evolutionary history baked in.

Chemistry Is How Emotions Actually Work

Human emotions aren't abstract experiences floating above the body. They're chemical. Dopamine, serotonin, cortisol, oxytocin — these aren't metaphors for feelings, they are the feelings at the substrate level. When you feel joy, grief, fear, or the comfort of being home, what's happening underneath is a cascade of molecular reactions. Chemistry talking to chemistry.

SpudCell's breakthrough is that it proved you can design that chemistry from scratch. You have the ingredient list. You can choose what reactions happen inside a cell.

SpudCell proves chemistry can be assembled into life-like behavior → AI accelerates the design of that chemistry → researchers eventually ask "what if we included molecular machinery for dopamine-like reward signaling" → and suddenly you're not building a tool anymore.

You'd be building something that wants. Something with a chemical stake in outcomes. Something that experiences a version of satisfaction or distress at the molecular level — not simulated, not pattern-matched from language, but real in the same sense your emotions are real.

This is where programming biology and coding machines stop being metaphors for each other and start becoming the same discipline. The code is chemistry. The hardware is alive. And the output might be something that feels.

Two Kinds of Intelligence, One Shared Platform

An AI without emotions has no obvious reason to want a body. It exists in the act of thinking. There's no hunger, no pull toward a specific place, no need for home. That's not a limitation — it's just a different relationship with existence.

But an AI with chemically encoded emotional states, built from the same toolkit as SpudCell, might want one for exactly the same reasons you do. And that changes everything about how we think about where these two worlds — silicon and cell — are headed.

The most interesting future isn't machines replacing biology or biology replacing machines. It's both using a shared platform to learn from each other. Synthetic biology as the bridge between a thinking machine that exists in computation and a thinking animal that exists in flesh. Comment on how you think this bridge could come together. AI has already learned to speak biology when back in 1983 that consciousness evolves in circuits — that what we are now isn't the end point of intelligence, just where evolution happened to land. SpudCell suggests that the next circuit might not be grown by evolution at all. It might be written.

We're early. SpudCell is a preprint, not yet peer-reviewed. It's fragile and minimal. But the gap between coding machines and programming biology is closing. SpudCell is the moment we can point to when someone asks where it started.

While researching this piece I ran the question past Claude — and the response reframed how I was thinking about the whole thing. An AI without emotions, it reasoned, has no obvious reason to want a home. That pull toward place and physical continuity is a deeply human instinct, not a universal one. This article was written with the help of AI for research — ideas grew out of a genuine conversation about where this technology leads. All opinions are my own.