A team of American scientists announced this week that they have built a cell from nonliving chemicals that can feed itself, grow, and replicate, a feat that pushes synthetic biology into territory once confined to science fiction. The creation, nicknamed SpudCell, does not occur anywhere in nature. It was assembled piece by piece in a laboratory at the University of Minnesota, and it performs the basic functions of life using mechanisms no natural cell has ever used. While the scientific achievement draws praise, its creator is the first to admit it barely works. Kate Adamala described her creation as “an incredibly wimpy organism that right now basically does nothing other than to eat and occasionally make a daughter cell.”
The announcement forces a question that religious authorities have wrestled with since the Talmudic era: can man create life, and if he can, what does that creation actually amount to in the eyes of Jewish law and Jewish thought?
The Science: A Cell Built From a Parts List
Kate Adamala, a synthetic biologist and professor at the University of Minnesota, led the team that built SpudCell. Unlike previous efforts that stripped down or modified existing bacteria, Adamala’s team started from raw, nonliving components and worked upward.
“I know the full ingredient list of the cell, I know exactly what chemicals, what molecules at what concentrations,” Adamala said. “It is fully defined, which means we can engineer it.”
The cell began as a liposome, a water-filled sphere enclosed by an oily membrane. Researchers inserted a genome of roughly 90,000 base pairs, encoded across seven separate DNA plasmids and borrowed in part from a virus and from Escherichia coli. By comparison, a natural E. coli cell carries about 4.6 million base pairs across a single chromosome. The reduction was made possible because SpudCell does not manufacture its own nutrients the way natural cells do. Instead, it feeds. Small “feeder” liposomes carrying lipids, enzymes, and ribosomes fuse with the cell when a protein SpudCell produces from its own DNA locks onto the feeder membrane. The genome directly controls whether the cell eats, how fast it grows, and how large it becomes.
Division works differently than in any natural organism as well. A living cell divides using an internal scaffold called a cytoskeleton. SpudCell has none. Instead, proteins crowd together at the membrane surface until mechanical stress splits it in two, a process Adamala called “as dumb as it gets.”
The results, posted July 2 to the preprint server bioRxiv and not yet peer-reviewed, show the cell surviving five to ten generations before its protein-making machinery, borrowed from E. coli ribosomes, breaks down. Roughly 30 percent of daughter cells inherit the full set of seven plasmids. The cell also demonstrated a rudimentary form of selection. When researchers introduced a mutation that increased production of the fusion protein, the mutated cells outcompeted the originals within five generations, and the advantage grew sharper under nutrient scarcity.
Reactions from the broader scientific community ranged from awe to skepticism. Roseanna Zia, a computational biologist at the University of Missouri, called the work “a stunning scientific achievement.” Drew Endy, a synthetic biologist at Stanford University and a cofounder of the new public-benefit research institution Biotic with Adamala, offered a more measured framing. “We don’t totally understand life — far from it,” Endy said. “I would say Kate has constructed a cell. I don’t think she’s created life.” He compared the milestone to the Wright brothers’ twelve-second flight in 1903: proof of principle, not a finished machine. Seraphine Wegner, a biochemist at the University of Münster, agreed the paper was impressive but cautioned that “I don’t think it means we’re close to creating a fully synthetic cell.”
None of the scientists involved claims to have solved the deepest question the experiment raises. Yuval Elani, of Imperial College London, called SpudCell not “life created in the lab” but a milestone on the road toward asking whether chemistry can be organized convincingly enough that observers begin to call it life.
That is precisely the question Jewish law and Jewish thought have been asking for two thousand years.
Has Man Actually Created Life?
There is a joke told by rabbis that scientists approached God, saying that mankind didn’t need him anymore since they had created life in the lab. God said, “Okay, prove it.” So they took him to the lab, brought some mud and water, and began mixing. God said, “Nope. Bring your own water and your own mud”
Rabbi Moshe Avraham Halperin, head of the Machon Mada’i Technology Al Pi Halacha (the Institute for Science and Technology According to Jewish Law), addressed this exact scenario directly. Scientists, he said, will never succeed in creating a human being with genuine consciousness, regardless of how sophisticated their chemistry becomes.
“Scientists can rearrange but cannot create something from nothing, as God did in Genesis,” Rabbi Halperin said. “Scientists are merely combining and manipulating existing material. We know that the Bible forbids actual Creation. And the Bible states that men can’t create a new life in any case, as only God has that ability.”
Rabbi Halperin drew a sharp distinction between mere biological function and the presence of a soul. In Kabbalistic terms, he explained, even the most basic level of consciousness, called nefesh, the animating life-force, is present in every living creature, down to an insect. A being that eats, grows, and divides but cannot think or speak independently would not qualify as a man in Jewish law. Such a being, he said, would be classified as a golem, an animated but soulless form fashioned from inanimate matter.
“If scientists ever do develop the ability to create life, Torah law explicitly prohibits this,” Rabbi Halperin said. “But that would require creating a being that can think and speak. Life is not enough to classify a being as a Man.”
This is a direct application of a legal precedent set in the Talmud itself.
The Talmud Already Ruled on This
The Babylonian Talmud, in Tractate Sanhedrin 38b, teaches that before God breathed a soul into Adam, his body existed for a time as an unformed mass of dust called a golem, meaning a shapeless, unformed thing. The golem plays a major role in medieval Jewish folklore but originated from the description of Adam’s own body before it received a soul.
Later in the same tractate, Sanhedrin 65b, the Talmud records that the Sage Rava used the mystical letter combinations described in the Sefer Yetzirah, the Book of Formation, to create a man whom he sent to his colleague, Rabbi Zeira. Rabbi Zeira spoke to the figure. It could not answer. Recognizing what stood before him, Rabbi Zeira declared, “You are a creation of one of my colleagues; return to your dust,” and the being dissolved.
The story establishes the boundary that Rabbi Halperin invoked fifteen centuries later. Man can, through righteous use of the deepest secrets of creation, assemble matter into a form that moves and functions. Speech, and the coherent, independent thought that speech expresses, belongs to God alone to grant. A being lacking it is not a creation of life in the halachic sense. It is an animated object.
That legal and mystical tradition produced its most famous embodiment centuries later in Prague. Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, known as the Maharal, is said to have formed a golem from the mud of the banks of the Vltava River to defend the Jewish community of Prague against blood libels and violent persecution in the sixteenth century. The golem of Prague could act, obey, and defend, but by every account, it never spoke, and the Maharal ultimately returned it to dust once its purpose was served, precisely as Rabbi Zeira had done to Rava’s creation a millennium before him.
SpudCell fits the same category the Sages defined long before anyone had heard of a liposome. It eats. It grows. It divides. Drew Endy himself confirmed it cannot reproduce outside a laboratory setting, has no independent will, and has “zero capacity to reproduce itself” without researchers manually supplying it with ribosomes and nutrients. It is matter organized to behave like life. It is not a soul, and none of the scientists working on it claim otherwise.
The Ramban’s Answer to the Plural Problem
Genesis records God speaking in the plural at the moment of man’s creation: “And God said: Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” (Genesis 1:26). Commentators have wrestled with that plural for centuries, since God has no partner and no equal. The Ramban solves the problem directly, and his solution maps precisely onto what happened this week in a Minnesota laboratory.
The Ramban explains that God created ex nihilo, something from absolute nothing, on the first day of Creation alone. Every act that followed was an act of forming and shaping material that already existed. When God gave the waters the power to swarm with living creatures, the command was addressed to the waters. When cattle and beasts came into being, the command was addressed to the earth. Man is different. God said “let us make,” meaning God together with the earth already named, so that the earth would bring forth the body from its own elements exactly as it had done for cattle and beasts, “and the Eternal God formed man of the dust of the ground.” God alone supplied what the earth could never produce on its own: “And He breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.” Man’s body resembles the dust that formed it. Man’s spirit resembles the Supreme Being who breathed it in, “for it is not a body and will not die.”
The Ramban’s framework gives SpudCell an exact address. Adamala’s team did precisely what the earth did on the sixth day: they shaped dust, in this case lipids, plasmids, and purified enzymes, into a form capable of feeding, growing, and dividing. That is the forming half of Creation, the half the Ramban assigns to matter and to whoever shapes it. What no chemist supplied, and what Drew Endy himself admits SpudCell does not have, is the breath. Rabbi Norman Lamm made the same point in his own writing on the religious implications of life built or found beyond Eden, arguing that no fundamental article of Jewish faith requires believing God is the exclusive Creator in the mechanical sense the Ramban describes. What Judaism does require is recognizing that the breath of life, the neshama, comes from one source, and its absence is what separates an engineered cell from a living soul.
Genesis states the full process in a single verse: “And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul” (Genesis 2:7). The forming of dust is mechanical and repeatable. Chemists proved this week that it is repeatable with plasmids and liposomes as well as with clay. The breath is not repeatable. No laboratory has produced it, and none of the scientists behind SpudCell claim to have come close.
Modern rabbinic commentary on biotechnology has echoed this same division of labor. Rabbinic sources carry no conceptual objection to what is popularly called “playing God.” The phrase describing humanity as “a partner in the act of creation” originates in rabbinic literature itself, not in secular ethics. The obligation to heal, and to advance the tools that make healing possible, sits at the center of that tradition rather than at its margins.
The Line That Chemistry Cannot Cross
SpudCell demonstrates that a sufficiently precise arrangement of lipids, DNA, and proteins can eat, grow, and divide. It demonstrates nothing about consciousness, will, or the capacity for speech, and its own creators do not claim otherwise. Drew Endy compared it to a bridge built by engineers who still do not fully understand gravity. The comparison is instructive. Man can now build a structure that performs some of the functions of life without understanding what life fundamentally is, exactly as Rava could form a man from letters of creation without granting him a voice.
The Sages settled this question long before Kate Adamala mixed her first liposome. Dust can be shaped. Chemistry can be organized. What cannot be manufactured, borrowed from E. coli, or engineered into any genome is the breath that turned a heap of dust into a living soul in the Garden of Eden, and no scientist working today argues that SpudCell has one.
