I have been observing advances in synthetic biology from 2010 onwards when I began to chart how that new discipline constructed a new language for itself ‘brick by metaphorical brick’. That was the time of BioBricks and speculations about building synthetic cells ‘from scratch’.
Now, some two decades later, we have gone from ‘bricks’ to ‘blobs’ with the advent of the SpudCell, a new type of synthetic cell announced on 1 July 2026. This announcement came in the middle of discussions about what constitutes life in biology, an eternal topic of speculation.
In this brief post I want to quickly summarise what SpudCell is, where its name comes from, and why it might be important. After that I’ll look at a very small sample of English Language News items, all 75 of them, harvested from Nexis, on 12 July and see what descriptions and metaphors I could find, focusing especially on bricks and blobs and their implications.
The not yet peer-reviewed paper announcing the new cell was published on Biotic, which is, according to a press release, “a public-benefit research and engineering institution that aims to build the shared technical infrastructure for synthetic cell engineering, and to keep it open for the participation of researchers around the world.” Professor Drew Endy from the University of Stanford, whom I remember from the BioBricks times, is a co-founder, according to the Guardian.
What’s a SpudCell?
There is now a useful Wikipedia article about this synthetic cell and there are also nice articles in the New York Times (Carl Zimmer), Science (Kai Kupferschmidt), The Guardian (Ian Sample), Ars Technica (John Timmer) and New Scientist (Michael LePage) to name just a few. But here goes:
SpudCell is the first fully synthetic, man-made cell designed to complete a full life cycle. It has been designed by synthetic biologists at the University of Minnesota and is built entirely from non-living chemicals (a lipid membrane and 36 selected genes). It can feed, grow, replicate its DNA, and divide, though it requires constant laboratory assistance to survive. Read about the ‘feeding’ process alone here – it’s complicated.
As Kai Kupferschmidt described it: “It’s just a microscopic water droplet surrounded by a fatty membrane and stuffed with chemicals and snippets of DNA encoding a mere 36 genes. But it’s also arguably the closest researchers have come to building a living cell from scratch.”
Unlike early synthetic biology attempts to build ‘minimal’ or ‘artificial cells’ by scaling down normal cells, this cell was built from the bottom up – assembling a semblance of life from purely chemical components. (see also Footnote)
What’s the name?
The lead authors of the paper are Associate Professors Kate Adamala and Aaron Engelhart. As Kai Kupferschmidt points out in his Science paper: “Adamala’s colleagues originally wanted to name the lab’s creation after her. ‘Call it something that’s not my name, call it a potato for all I care,” she says she told them. SpudCell stuck—and the echo of Sputnik is welcome, Adamala says.’” Ian Sample points out that “Adamala calls them SpudCells to evoke Sputnik and the dawn of the space age, but it’s not the only reason. ‘I’m Polish,’ she said. ‘I’m mostly made of potatoes.’” Other outlets report that the name echoes the shape of the cells which are potato, indeed, blob like.
The name is an amalgamation of the British slang name for a potato, a reference to Polish people’s favourite food, the shape of the cell, and the name for the first artificial satellite. That’s how you build at least a name if not a cell brick by metaphorical brick. But there is a tension in the name, between the spud and the sputnik. We’ll get back to that.
What’s the point?
The hope is that SpudCell may be able to tell us things about how life works that natural cells cannot. But As John Timmer stresses in Ars Technica: “There’s a truism that all models are wrong, but some are useful. And that seems to be the case here. We know this is not a good model of a primitive cell in the sense that it doesn’t reflect what the earliest cells on Earth looked like. But it still could be useful for asking questions about them.”
They could also perhaps be engineered to make new medicines and capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. I remember these dreams from my days at the Synthetic Biology Research Centre…. Prof John Dupré, a philosopher at the University of Exeter, told the Daily Mail: “This work is undoubtedly technically very impressive. Whether it ‘will ultimately underlie diverse applications across all of biotechnology’”, is more questionable.
Hype
As is usual with any well-publicised new scientific discovery, there was some hype. We find the typical metaphors of ‘greatest mystery’, ‘breakthrough’, ‘greatest feat’, even, according to Tom Ellis, a professor of synthetic genome engineering at Imperial College London “probably the biggest breakthrough in recent times in the synthetic cell field.” (CNN, 1 July) There is talk of this discovery revolutionising synthetic biology, and the Times of India even wonders whether “a new cellular age is starting”. The allusion to Sputnik feeds into this type of hype.
The usual journey metaphors are used, such as big leap, major step, and milestone. However, there are also some more cautions voices, with The Week headlining an article with “New synthetic cells tiptoe toward creating life”.
One metaphor was quite startling, when Roseanne Zia talked about a “shake-the-ground accomplishment” – and that brings us to the next section of my very quick and superficial metaphor analysis of bricks and blobs, two metaphor families that are in tension with each other, as we shall see. Cells are build up of ‘biobricks’, but they are also ‘just’ ‘blobs’…..
Bricks
We have all learned that DNA is made of chemical ‘building blocks’ called nucleotides. More generally, the phrase ‘building blocks of life’ is used to refer to all sorts of components that make up a living cell and life more generally. This phrase has been used since about the 1950s and is a staple of science communication, for good or for ill.
Some forty years later, the concept of BioBricks emerged. This refers to standardised, interchangeable DNA sequences, indeed ‘building blocks’, used in synthetic biology to design and assemble complex biological circuits. They are said to function like biological Legos as they allow scientists to build new biological functions into cells using a modular or engineering approach. BioBricks are managed and promoted by the BioBricks Foundation, a non-profit organisation dedicated to keeping synthetic biology open-source, ethical, and publicly accessible – and I remember SBRC students participating in their competitions.
Life as an assembly kit was a central metaphor on which synthetic biology itself was built. Now, with SpudCell, we have returned to that metaphor. One of the central metaphors used was “from the ground up”, referring to the researchers’ efforts to build a cell from pre-existing parts. As the Daily Mail and many others expressed it: “This is not the first time that scientists have attempted to make synthetic life, but, unlike those earlier attempts, SpudCell is entirely constructed from the ground up.”
One article in the Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN) (3 July) linked the building metaphor back to Richard Feynman and the origins of synthetic biology. Feynman is quoted as saying: “’What I cannot build, I cannot understand.’ The idea is that we don’t really have a full understanding what biology is … unless we’re able to build it from scratch, from known chemical components. And that was the motivation for the whole field [of synthetic biology]: Let’s put it together and try to reconstitute as much of natural biology as we can but also build on it, make it better, expand biology.” Somebody else quipped: “The greatest engineering breakthroughs often begin when we stop asking, “How do we improve this?” and start asking, “Can we build it from the ground up?”” (IPC International Inc., 7 July)
And that brings us back to the long-standing talk about ‘building blocks’. As Carl Zimmer reported in the New York Times: “The lab-made cell, called SpudCell, could help researchers better understand the basic building blocks of life.”
There was one fly in the ointment of the SpudCell though. Building was done by humans – as Victor de Lorenzo pointed out: it’s based on manually assembling pre-existing biochemical components and cellular parts (CE Noticias Financieras English, 2 July). The cell cannot ‘build’ its own ribosomes.
But building metaphors were certainly central to this announcement, even producing mixed metaphors like this: “Researchers at the University of Minnesota have built a lab-made blob called “SpudCell”… (The Economic Times, 2 July). Can one build a blob? It seems so.
Blobs
Alongside bricks and building, blobs became a central framing device for the SpudCell. There was talk of blobs, drops, spheres and bubbles, indeed bubbles “filled with enzymes, chemicals, and small snippets of DNA” (Mail Online, 2 July). The Guardian’s headline spoke of “beautiful blobs” and Ian Sample of “tiny, quivering spheres” or more precisely “tiny water-filled spheres called liposomes”: “Researchers claim they are closer to creating life from scratch after building tiny, quivering blobs that use lab-made DNA to feed, grow and multiply in a dish.” (1 July).
In fact, the lead author of the SpudCell paper, Kate Adamala herself used the word ‘blob’ for the SpudCell, as it didn’t look like much under the microscope (Guardian, 1 July). She also called them, “in her own words ‘wimpy’ and ‘helpless’” (The Economist, 1 July).
As The Times reported (1 July): “the tiny blobs aren’t technically alive, but can perform some of the chemical reactions seen in living cells. ‘It’s a cell that was built, not born. It’s constructed, but it does what cells do,’ says synthetic biologist Drew Endy.”
The blob framing merged with the ‘from scratch’ cliché and with the ‘dish’ imagery of artificial life in a headline for ZME Science (2 July): “’Almost alive’: Scientists built an artificial cell-like blob from scratch”…”A tiny blob in a dish”….”building tiny, quivering blobs that use lab-made DNA to feed, grow and multiply in a dish”…: “A look at this blob and it’s nothing special. It looks like a microscopic water droplet. But it’s also arguably the closest researchers have come to building a living cell from scratch.”
And finally, Times of India (2 July) brought the blob back to the SpudCell’s name and asks: “Could some ‘blobs’ in a dish spark the ‘Sputnik’ moment for synthetic life?”
Framing tensions
This quick analysis of the how Spudcell was framed by its assemblers and by journalists reveals two types of tensions: there is a tension in the name itself and there are tensions between the two metaphor families of bricks and blobs. Let’s look at these more closely.
Adamala, the lead author, explicitly invokes ‘Sputnik’ as a space-race, prestige-moment metaphor. This metaphor of geopolitical triumph sits oddly next to ‘potato’, a self-deprecating metaphor based on an edible, national-comfort-food, and ‘blob, a framing that wavers between belittling the cell and evoking horror movies and grey goo. We have here three, if not four, metaphor registers doing different rhetorical jobs for the same eight-letter name.
Now to bricks and blobs and the tension between these metaphor families. ‘Building blocks’, ‘from the ground up’, and ‘engineering’ evoke images of control, precision, design and legibility. By contrast, the words ‘blob’, ‘drop’, ‘bubble’, ‘quivering’, ‘wimpy’ and ‘helpless’ evoke images of formless, wet, uncontrolled, almost abject entities. One framing says we designed this and we have control, the other (often from the same people) says we don’t fully understand what we made and it’s a bit of a mess.
The metaphors framing the announcement of the SpudCell thus echo a classic synthetic biology framing tension between mastery-rhetoric and the messy organic reality resisting it. The announcement also reflects a rather novel tension between simultaneously hyping something up (Sputnik) and playing something down (potato, blob), which I haven’t seen before in synthetic biology.
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For more analysis of synthetic biology, metaphors, rhetoric and responsible language use, you can read my previous blog posts on this webpage.
Footnote: As this post was inspired by Christoph from the Small Things Considered blog, I also wanted to mention his recommendation to read a blog post on a previous endeavour by the Petra Schwille lab from 2022 to create an artificial cell from the bottom up, but which unlike the Spudcell, didn’t attract as much media coverage/hype. As he said in a Bluesky post: “here’s a artificial cell from 2022, with way less than 36 genes. nevertheless prepared to divide ‘the bacterial way’. As Kendall Powell wrote in Nature in 2018 in an article entitled “How biologists are creating life-like cells from scratch”: “To biophysicist Petra Schwille, the dancing creations in her lab represent an important step towards building a synthetic cell from the bottom up, something she has been working towards for the past ten years, most recently at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany.”
Image: Picryl: Vassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) Circles in a Circle, 1923
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