The structure, July 3 -- What Kate Adamala built in her University of Minnesota laboratory does not breathe, does not metabolize food in the ordinary sense, and has no evolutionary history. It was assembled, component by component, from chemicals on a bench. Then it divided.

does the definition of life need to be revised, or does SpudCell simply not qualify?

Synthetic biologists have been working toward a minimal cell for decades. The J. Craig Venter Institute achieved a milestone in 2016 when it engineered a bacterium with the smallest genome known to support independent life, a stripped-down organism derived from the mycoplasma class of bacteria. That cell was biological in origin: it began from living material and had its genome succ...