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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

#161

Post by jrflo »

twothreeone wrote: post #99
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 nearl…

Yeah, the scientific review process is extremely weird. I've had several papers published and the responses you get from reviews is sometimes complete nonsense. Sometimes it feels like some reviewers do little more than skim your paper or get a power trip off of rejecting people. Lots of politics and people trying to reject ideas that are counter to the ones their own labs are pushing. I don't blame the authors for expecting to get push back from their work, many breakthroughs are usually met with resistance from the status quo.

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

#162

Post by xpct »

ahmedfromtunis wrote: post #152
xpct wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting thought experiment, but I don't see why automating machines that build and repair other machines wouldn't be sufficient. At the limit, such a machine would be able to repair itself, or repair other long-running machines. I imagine it would come down to wear and efficiency loss.

Manufacturing requires micromanaging every aspect of the process, requiring special machinery, trained workforce (human or not), inventory management. Reproduction, once we master its blueprint of course, is much less demanding: just provide the ingredients at approximate proportions and the chemistry will work its magic to provide a similar enough unit to achieve the required task.

In this case I'm seeing 'micromanaging' as something akin to automating a Tesla superfactory: machines complete each individual step, we get a working car at the end.

Obviously, we'd have processes built that build machines for each of the individual tasks, or changing tracks to support new car models.

From my perspective, this framework of a factory could map to many other endeavours where we either produce the end product or a machine used for something else.

So, the difference would be whether the machines utilize chemical/biological processes for working, or are made out of steel, at which point it would boil down to economics.

I guess I don't see what's so special about adding 'bio' to these perpetual factories.

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

#164

Post by NetMageSCW »

colordrops wrote: post #8
TSiege wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a biologist so I can't say for sure, but it seems like it would be a lot easier to edit an existing living organism to produce those products than it would be to create completely from scratch. We already do this with the process known as precision fermentation. We've gotten very good at editing genomes via CRISPR and related techniques and are only getting better https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_ferme…

It seems that eventually you could build much more flexible and powerful if you build from scratch. Hacking existing cells is a shortcut but longer term we may get grey goo.

I don’t think biological cells are likely to lead to grey goo the way nanobots are - we may just end up with green and pink goo instead of animals and plants though.

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

#165

Post by bellowsgulch »

commieneko wrote: post #153
whycome wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the guardrails here?

I've read than even a lot of high school biology questions can set off safety guardrails on Claude.

A lot of high school biology underpins the most immediate interesting aspects of chemistry and biology, and also the most volatile and dangerous ones.

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

#166

Post by ahmedfromtunis »

boogieknite wrote: post #142
ahmedfromtunis wrote: post #78

You stumble upon a news article from 2226. You read it to see who, between Google, OpenAI and Anthropic, won the AI race. Instead, your learn about Biotic. It's now the leading polity in the solar system and its environs. It bought Alphabet, OpenAI and Anthropic in a single day back in 2084. Humans are no longer desired. Their reproduction is capped to an optimal minimum assuring the survival of the species as a reli…

I'm not too well read so Mars Express is the first fiction where I came across these themes. Highly recommend. When I watched it 18 months ago I didn't realize real development was ongoing in these scifi-seeming fields

Thanks for the recommendation. I'm trying to get myself to watch more movies and this looks like the perfect one for a cosy weekend.

And yes, science it seems is advancing faster than we might be aware of.

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

#167

Post by scarmig »

burnte wrote: post #3

Interesting that this is led by the same Dr. Kate Adamala who ended the right-handed-proteins experiment a couple of years ago. Given how close she was I'm not surprised she's made this work.

Back then, it sounded like making right-handed life was decades away. But with this work, couldn't you just as easily make this kind of synthetic cell right-handed?

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

#168

Post by bellowsgulch »

tom-villani wrote: post #38
soraki_soladead wrote: post #4

This is awesome! Can someone in this field comment on the implications of sidestepping the cytoskeleton?

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…

Somewhere here is a science fiction story that humanity is too inexperienced at synthetic biology to create sophisticated forms for manufacturing and have to result to the equivalent of bashing proteins together to make inferior biology to some future humans or other species.

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

#170

Post by Conscat »

bouchard wrote: post #126
vintagedave wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fairness, it's a workaround against something that likely should not have happened. Problems require creative (aka unusual) solutions.

Rejections from journals are not uncommon and sometimes it's for somewhat questionable reasons. Uploading the manuscript to a preprint server and/or submitting to another journal, which Adamala is doing/planning to do, is the normal response. Sending it to journalists beforehand is what I consider an overreaction.

It would only be effective if the significance of this work is clear. They certainly felt this message needed to reach people, and that it did work makes it self evident they were probably right.
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