From primal scenes to synthetic cells

Abstract

Synthetic cells spark intriguing questions about the nature of life. Projects such as BaSyC (Building a Synthetic Cell) aim to build an entity that mimics how living cells work. But what kind of entity would a synthetic cell really be? I assess this question from a philosophical perspective, and show how early fictional narratives of artificial life – such as the laboratory scene in Goethe’s Faust – can help us to understand the challenges faced by synthetic biology researchers.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 16 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.