Kate Adamala

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Katarzyna (Kate) P. Adamala is an American synthetic biologist and a professor of genetics at the University of Minnesota. Her work covers astrobiology, synthetic cell engineering, and biocomputing.

Adamala studies how life could begin, including experiments on RNA replication without enzymes. She has helped develop liposome-based synthetic cells and is a founder and steering group member of the Build-a-Cell Initiative, an international effort to create synthetic living cells. She is also a co-founder of Synlife, a company focused on synthetic cells.

Together with Jack Szostak, she showed that non-enzymatic RNA replication in primitive protocells is possible only in the presence of a weak cation chelator such as citric acid. This work supports the idea that citric acid could have played a central role in early metabolism.

In 2017, Adamala gave a TEDx talk titled “Life but not Alive” about how and why humans can create synthetic cells. In December 2024, she co-authored a perspective in Science calling for a moratorium on the creation of fully synthetic mirror-image microorganisms, or “mirror life.” The piece argued that such organisms could pose biosafety risks and require thorough risk assessment before further development. It was signed by 37 scientists, including Nobel laureates Greg Winter and Jack Szostak. Some researchers questioned how urgent these concerns are, while others emphasized the need for caution.