Prepare to Cross the Streams

When the real Mr. Potato Head comes for your city

I’ve been rewatching some of my favorite movies, including the original 1984 Ghostbusters. I’m especially fond of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. If I were to reimagine the movie for today, however, I would replace him with a no less terrifying, but—given the success of synthetic biologist Dr. Kate Adamala and her team at the University of Minnesota—far more plausible Mr. Potato Head.

My first Hasbro Mr. Potato Head was a set of plastic push pins in the shapes of eyes, a nose, a mouth, glasses, ears, etc., that you pushed into real potatoes. Eventually, the need for real potatoes became moot when plastic ones were included in the package. Today, Toy Story 5 continues the saga of that Mr. Potato Head, but not the Mr. Potato Head we ought to fear.

Dr. Adamala’s Mr. Potato Head, which she calls SpudCell, perhaps to avoid trademark infringement, is a real being that eats, grows, reproduces, and competes with others of its kind for food, just as you and I do.

Is this Mr. Potato Head, er, SpudCell, alive like we are?

Dr. Adamala hesitates to say. “Life is not binary,” she explains to Carl Zimmer and Marco Hernandez, reporters from The New York Times who also eat, grow, reproduce, and compete for food. “That’s why I’m hesitant to call this ‘alive.’ There’s no clear line, as much as we would love it to be.”

No clear line? Really? Is this why something as innocent as the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, which Ray Stantz (Dan Aykroyd) calls “the most harmless thing…something that could never possibly destroy us,” becomes the embodiment of Zuul and sets out to annihilate New York City?

Synthetic biologist Drew Endy of Stanford said that Mr. Potato Head—SpudCell—is “a cell that was built, not born. It’s constructed, but it does what cells do.”

And what do cells do? They produce energy, manage information, and eventually band together to create multicellular organisms who invent gods and flags and then kill each other over those gods and flags. Is this SpudCell’s destiny: Kartoffel über alles (Potatoes Over All)?

Dr. Endy is now working with Dr. Adamala and others to make SpudCell more fully alive and adaptable. As Zimmer and Hernandez write, Mr. Potato Head “might someday be engineered to do things that natural cells can’t, like making new kinds of medicine or drawing large amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.”

That sounds good, but so did taking Vitamin C until I took too much and got diarrhea.

How long before SpudCell brings on “a disaster of biblical proportions… real wrath-of-God-type stuff, fire and brimstone coming down from the skies… the dead rising from the graves… human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria!”?

How long before SpudCell develops a black mustache, pink ears, a red nose, a black hat, blue pants and shoes, grows to 112.5 feet tall, and wreaks havoc in a Democratic Socialist city like New York, which has withstood the likes of Godzilla, Galactus, and the Beast from 20,000 Fathoms? What good is rent control when your apartment building is reduced to rubble by a 15-story Mr. Potato Head?

Dr. Adamala began her work by experimenting on real cells, but abandoned that to work on synthetic cells, and then discovered mutant cells that she fed with “snack-filled bubbles.” What was in those snacks? Stay Puft Marshmallows? Have you tried to find a bag of Stay Puft Marshmallows in any grocery store? You can’t. There aren’t any. Is Dr. Adamala hoarding them for her army of Mr. Potato Heads?

We must assume she is. If she is, we have to ask: how can we kill Mr. Potato Head?

“I don’t want to say it dies,” Dr. Adamala says. “But it stops working.” She doesn’t want to say it dies because it doesn’t die. It just stops working and can be repaired. Perhaps another Stay Puft Marshmallow bubble will revive this terror and threaten another city!

Or maybe there is no need to revive a nonworking Mr. Potato Head.

According to the Times, “Dr. Adamala can create a fresh batch of them in her own lab in about a day.” A fresh batch of killer Mr. Potato Heads in a day!

How do we stop this alien invasion? “Who you gonna call?” Stephen Miller? He looks like Mr. Potato Head. For all I know, he might be SpudCell Zero.

I’m not making this up. As Zimmer and Hernandez write, “For now, the synthetic cell can only survive a few generations on a special lab diet. [Stay Puft Marshmallows today? Soylent Green tomorrow?] But future versions may be more robust, raising the possibility that someone might someday use SpudCells unethically, perhaps even to make a weapon.”

No! People using science unethically to make weapons? As Dr. Endy says (ironically, given his name, if that is his name), “This is just the beginning.”

It may be time to cross the streams.

[See https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/07/01/science/spudcells-synthetic-cell.html?campaign_id=60&emc=edit_na_20260701&instance_id=178070&nl=breaking-news&regi_id=68602011&segment_id=222387&user_id=a0520cadca5a0da7c69ec4c5f52fda59]