Synthetic Cells There is a grey zone that sep arates the living from the not living. A place that we still know hardly anything about and which hides a secret that scientists have been seeking for centuries. A secret that alchemists sought obsessively and which has inspired writers and artists throughout history. The secret is none other than that of the recipe for generating the breath of life or bringing it back when it has abandoned a dead body. It should not surprise us that the major religions have forged much of their particular myth ology through resurrection and providing explanations to the uncertainty about what awaits us when the mind switches off for good. Even a fictional story like the one José Saramago proposes for us in Death’s Intermittence is disturbing. A world without death would be as unfeasible as it is inadmissible. The only certainty is that, no matter how ordinary life and its unavoidable opposite are, the point at which both meet draws the line between two apparently different worlds. We know a lot about the possibilities of chemistry and also about what happens inside our cells, but we have not yet been able to understand the exact nature of the boundary that separates a soup of inert molecules from a system capable of reproducing itself. The world of chemistry offers a host of extraordinary examples, of structures and processes that emerge spontan eously as a result of the interactions between molecules, giving rise to phenomena at times unexpected. In some experiments, regular chemical waves are formed that are observable with the naked eye, despite the fact that the chemical molecules that generate them
(through microscopic reactions) inhabit the atomic scale, totally beyond what our senses will ever be able to capture. In other cases, the mixture of polymers in certain conditions gives rise to spatial structures organized as spheres, foam. But none of them, up to now, contains that strange property of living systems: the ability to replicate themselves indefinitely. This problem has fascinated philosophers and scientists alike. During the period of the development of alchemy, long before rationality and the critical discourse were part of the method of studying nature, the very idea of life remained in obscurity and the quest for eternal youth or ways for spontaneously creating life were based on all kinds of prejudices and irrational ideas. Only with the arrival of science, beginning with Pasteur (who demonstrated the absurdity of spontaneous generation) and with the slow invasion of evolutionist ideas, did the first suggestions that life could be obtained artificially begin to materialize. The very possibility that something might exist in the non-living world capable of producing life has emerged time and again throughout history. It is no coincidence that Mary Shelley, when writing her magnificent novel Frankenstein (at the age of 18) should have introduced a scientist who, using physics and chemistry, brought his creature back to life. At that time galvan ism and some of its less rigorous derivations were all the rage. In particular, the physicist Giovanni Aldini, nephew of the famous Galvani, studied the effect of electric currents, supplied through batteries from that time, on human corpses. These corpses came from executions, and the story of what happened is to say the least surprising. Occasionally an eye, a mouth opened, at times a hand closed into a fist while the arm rose up, or the dead
Ricard Solé