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For first time, a cell built from scratch grows and divides

quantamagazine.org

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Re: For first time, a cell built from scratch grows and divides

#81

Post by Aachen »

oliverx0 wrote: post #77
merksittich wrote: post #54

Science News has a more balanced take, with additional quotes from peers. > Some have also grumbled about Adamala’s efforts to draw attention to the work, which she says was rejected by Cell after one reviewer said SpudCells were not real biology. She then sent the 190-page manuscript to journalists, under embargo, even before she had uploaded it to the preprint server bioRxiv, where her colleagues could read and ass…

Crazy that a Cell reviewer would claim synthetic biology is not biology

Exoplanets also aren't planets. Some things just seem to have definitions with a history that get applied to new discoveries that don't fall within the definition. Distinguishing random rocks in space from planets was done by requiring planets to orbit around the sun, and so planets elsewhere cannot be called planets no matter that it's 1:1 the same thing. Biology probably has a similar history of trying to draw a line somewhere between what was created and what evolved to be part of the 'natural' world

Re: For first time, a cell built from scratch grows and divides

#82

Post by dehrmann »

srean wrote: post #56

Waiting for lab-grown meat. Hope it comes closer to fruition before my kidneys give out.

There are multiple FDA-approved lab-grown meats on the market. You can literally go to a handful of restaurants and order lab-grown meat today. The production process is just expensive and it's getting scaled out.

Re: For first time, a cell built from scratch grows and divides

#83

Post by adrianN »

srean wrote: post #56

Waiting for lab-grown meat. Hope it comes closer to fruition before my kidneys give out.

Lab-grown meat seems completely unrelated to synthetic biology. For lab grown meat the problem to my knowledge is that it is very expensive to grow vertebrate cells in the absence of an immune system because every contamination kills the batch.

Re: For first time, a cell built from scratch grows and divides

#84

Post by srean »

dehrmann wrote: post #82
srean wrote: post #56

Waiting for lab-grown meat. Hope it comes closer to fruition before my kidneys give out.

There are multiple FDA-approved lab-grown meats on the market. You can literally go to a handful of restaurants and order lab-grown meat today. The production process is just expensive and it's getting scaled out.

Yes. It's still quite a distance away from a feel and taste of meat. At least the affordable ones.

Re: For first time, a cell built from scratch grows and divides

#85

Post by adrian_b »

danans wrote: post #19
adrian_b wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While this is an impressive step forward, there remains an extremely long way, probably of several decades, until being able to design and synthesize a cell comparable in complexity with a bacterium. The thing that they made is more alive than a crystal, which when placed in a suitable solution will grow and reproduce its own structure, but much less alive than even the simplest known living cells. Its "life" is simi…

> Its "life" is similar to that of a brain-dead human, whose body is not left to die by a bunch of machines that pump air into its lungs and nutrients through its blood vessels A brain-dead human is alive, but just facing systemic collapse, aka death. That's not to imply that what the scientists here have created is alive, but the comparison isn't so apt.

As a multi-cellular organism, a brain-dead human is not alive, even if most of its cells may remain alive as long as they are fed from outside.

OK, what I have said above is not generally true, as some brain-dead humans may be more alive than others, e.g. some integrative functions, like some feedback loops that function through the endocrine system or through the autonomous nervous system, may still be working, connecting some organs with each other.

My comparison was with a very dead brain-dead human, who was reduced to the equivalent of a tissue culture.

These artificial cells also have some components that continue to work like in a living cell, doing some nucleic acid replication and some protein and lipid synthesis from precursors provided from outside, but they lack the capability to perform many of the chemical reactions that would be needed to close the complex network of feedback loops that enable a true living cell to live autonomously.

Re: For first time, a cell built from scratch grows and divides

#86

Post by oliverx0 »

Aachen wrote: post #81
oliverx0 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crazy that a Cell reviewer would claim synthetic biology is not biology

Exoplanets also aren't planets. Some things just seem to have definitions with a history that get applied to new discoveries that don't fall within the definition. Distinguishing random rocks in space from planets was done by requiring planets to orbit around the sun, and so planets elsewhere cannot be called planets no matter that it's 1:1 the same thing. Biology probably has a similar history of trying to draw a li…

Exoplanets are planets. Also, for clarification, biology is not defined as “the study of things produced exclusively by natural evolution.” Synthetic biology works with biological components and living systems (DNA, proteins, regulatory networks, cells and organisms). It differs from much traditional biology mainly in its constructive, engineering-oriented approach. Synthetic systems are often built precisely to test hypotheses about how natural biological systems function. Claiming it is not biology is wrong IMO.

Re: For first time, a cell built from scratch grows and divides

#87

Post by groceries8192 »

ZenoArrow wrote: post #72
el_io wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You if believe creating life will end religion then you're wrong. We thought evolutionary theory would do the same, now we got people who believe god directed evolution. Some believe everything evolved from a common ancestor except Humans. So the believers will adapt to believe that Genesis was talking about exactly this.

Science can't disprove religion. Consider the "big bang", is that any less of a miracle than "God did it"? Science is like "just give us one miracle and we'll explain the rest".

The big bang theory isn't even incompatible with the idea that 'God did it'; the idea was first proposed by a Catholic priest, as a matter of fact! I think the anti-science stance of evangelicals has eclipsed in the modern consciousness the fact that modern science owes much to the Catholic church.

> This startling idea first appeared in scientific form in 1931, in a paper by Georges Lemaître, a Belgian cosmologist and Catholic priest.

excerpt from https://www.amnh.org/learn-teach/curriculum-collections/cosm...

Re: For first time, a cell built from scratch grows and divides

#89

Post by jmaw »

khriss wrote: post #57
ezst wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(opens a new tab)

Yeah, I was wondering about that as well. Some weird AI transcriber?

I interpreted it as the author adding some internal dialog about how they want to do more research on the article/person in question so they were opening up a new tab so they could learn more. But I can see how this could certainly be some copy/paste artifact.

Re: For first time, a cell built from scratch grows and divides

#90

Post by groceries8192 »

system33- wrote: post #52
mattlondon wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That is the holy grail? At one end we're creating artificial life , the other we are creating artificial intelligence . We're coming at everything we as the human race have known for millennia from both ends, simultaneously. We're recreating that, from scratch. That is absolutely fucking wild. Ironically this "holy" grail will end up being the thing that finally puts religious creation myths in their place (i.e. as…

Nah. The natural pivot is from “we have never observed abiogenesis” to “see? Life required a creator.” You can’t win

Thomas Aquinas made the argument that all life comes from other life in the 13th Century. I wouldn't classify it as a modern pivot so much as one of the central philosophical arguments for the existence of a Creator.
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