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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

#91

Post by Windchaser »

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

Aye, but this will let us gradually work towards more and more basic cell forms, so that we can eventually figure out abiogenesis.

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

#92

Post by hparadiz »

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 also aren't planets.

Imagine writing this.

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

#93

Post by 1234letshaveatw »

cogman10 wrote: post #80
oliverx0 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Well of course, it doesn't have a soul. /s Yeah, I have a hard time reconciling this especially since biology and biologic research often involves things like enzymes which both aren't alive and are synthetically created. I'm certain cell magazine has published articles on novel enzyme discovery.

Cause of all the theists at cell

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

#94

Post by flurpitude »

Zambyte wrote: post #76
dbingham wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the issue is that those stories are rooted very much in the failures of human systems that we see every day. They are us imagining what could go wrong based on what has gone wrong and is going wrong. It would be a lot easier to set those warnings aside if we didn't have so many examples of the very things they warn about happening in real life. We currently have a system where private individuals can fund pri…

It's important to emphasize that cars are the leading source of carbon emissions. Anyone fighting against AI on the basis of climate change should be fighting for safe and reliable alternatives to driving everywhere.

Should also be fighting for that.

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

#96

Post by blorbthrow »

> 'Unlike living natural cells... the synthetic SpudCell can't survive and replicate without feeding on external food and ribosomes'

So in the future when there's a lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of SpudCellular Biology, the SpudCells will devour all biological life they can in order to harvest the building blocks they need. "Just social distance and wear two masks," the Surgeon General tells the CNN correspondent, as he disolves to red gray goo on live TV.

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

#97

Post by sourpanda »

satvikpendem wrote: post #61
khriss wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Maybe an accessibility feature for TTS or blind users?

that's exactly it, not AI at all. If you inspect any link in the article it shows it as screen-reader-text

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

#98

Post by CamperBob2 »

Zambyte wrote: post #76
dbingham wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the issue is that those stories are rooted very much in the failures of human systems that we see every day. They are us imagining what could go wrong based on what has gone wrong and is going wrong. It would be a lot easier to set those warnings aside if we didn't have so many examples of the very things they warn about happening in real life. We currently have a system where private individuals can fund pri…

It's important to emphasize that cars are the leading source of carbon emissions. Anyone fighting against AI on the basis of climate change should be fighting for safe and reliable alternatives to driving everywhere.

And the most promising of those alternatives is, ironically enough, AI itself. Fighting data centers is literally like fighting nuclear power. If you just want more carbon emissions, then by all means, proceed.

Of course most people who commute to work don't need to be doing that now, but that's the other big elephant in the room with AI. We don't use the intelligence we already have, so what makes us think the emergence of ASI/AGI will change anything?

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

#99

Post by twothreeone »

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…

The problem is this: as an academic you tend to know the reviewer landscape within your field. You have seen this happen to a colleague before, they submitted a paper, it had interesting results - it was forcefully rejected by 1 or 2 extremely negative reviewers. The publication gets delayed, you need to wait another 6 months to get the next set of reviews. Meanwhile, some "colleague" from another lab publishes nearly identical experiments and gets slightly better results. They push onto a pre-pub server and immediately get it into a tier-1 venue. They are now state of the art. You are now merely the person reproducing original work.

TL;DR politics breaks everything.

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

#100

Post by ACCount37 »

red75prime wrote: post #67
tom-villani wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this is definitely awesome. In eukaryotic cells (your cells) the cytoskeleton is needed to shape the cell, position DNA, and most importantly for this study, separate daughter cells allowing replication. Think of the complexity here, you need to make compartments to separate the copies of the genetic material, physically separated during division. Microtubules assemble the "mitotic spindle" and then pulls the si…

And the synthetic cell doesn't need to do anything about separating genetic material between daughter cells because it's just free-floating DNA that is likely to be in both parts. Right?

More like, the DNA is tied to the membrane, so splitting the membrane splits the DNA too.
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