Slides Section 1: Abstract Trees are an extremely old technology — the design hasn’t meaningfully changed in over 10 million years, yet a premium tree still takes 20 years to grow and wood remains expensive. The deeper question behind “how do we grow trees 100× faster?” is the problem of morphology: how does a single seed, running purely local computation in each cell, self-assemble into a global 3D form? We can design a bridge in CAD, but we have no equivalent for designing an organism — no way to translate a target 3D shape into the per-cell program that grows it. This project takes an engineering-first approach: build the missing CAD-for-cells layer in silico first, then map it onto biological substrates. As validation, I built Morpheus, a voxel-based cell morphology simulator in which each cell runs the same short program, communicates only with neighbours via diffusing hormone gradients, and collectively grows a cylinder (a “cigar”) from a single seed cell. The longer-term aim is to compile these designs onto a real chassis — the JCVI-syn3.0 minimal cell — and use the same primitives to grow custom organoids, faster trees, and eventually plants engineered into specific 3D shapes such as a house frame or a portable dwelling-seed for space travel.