How to redesign life to make it alien

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Editor's note: Here’s something to chew on during a pandemic. Forget bat viruses, if alien viruses from outer space existed, could they infect us? Viruses on Earth are parasites that can infect living hosts and hijack their resources to make new viruses because “Earth-hosts” are compatible. This is because all life evolved on the planet from common ancestors using variations of the same chemistry. But if there were alien parasites adapted to different alien hosts, they might be so different from Earth life that they’d be completely mismatched to it. We have not yet discovered life outside of Earth, of course. But aided by recent technological advances and audacious thinking, researchers in the field of synthetic biology are redesigning both the molecules that life is made of and life itself. And in turn, they’re in the process of creating aspects of life that are “alien” to life itself. But before we get to that, we need to know what life is. In his new book What is Life?, Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Paul Nurse laid out three principles shared by all life forms. …