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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

#181

Post by hoppp »

bensyverson wrote: post #2

> “It’s a big step forward to this holy grail of making a living thing out of dead components,” said Sijbren Otto, a systems chemist at the Stratingh Institute for Chemistry in the Netherlands who was not involved in the work. That is the holy grail? I get that the goal is to "grow" biofuels, plastic, fertilizer, drugs, or whatever else we can imagine. But is that worth the many apocalyptic sci-fi outcomes we can ima…

All we need is an at-home DNA printer and the world or life as we know it can be forever changed by a kid and an AI.

Its really easy now to engineer novel deadly viruses thanks to alphafold3

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

#182

Post by JumpCrisscross »

jmaw wrote: post #89
khriss wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> some copy/paste artifact

It’s this. I noticed after posting, found it funny and so left it in.

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

#183

Post by Retric »

Conscat wrote: post #170
bouchard wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Journalists believing what you tell them says nothing about if the underlying work is actually significant.

The legacy of bad science being picked up is why this is a bad idea, even you personally don’t think it’s an issue the risk reward isn’t about just you.

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

#186

Post by hoppp »

yread wrote: post #22
bensyverson wrote: post #2

> “It’s a big step forward to this holy grail of making a living thing out of dead components,” said Sijbren Otto, a systems chemist at the Stratingh Institute for Chemistry in the Netherlands who was not involved in the work. That is the holy grail? I get that the goal is to "grow" biofuels, plastic, fertilizer, drugs, or whatever else we can imagine. But is that worth the many apocalyptic sci-fi outcomes we can ima…

I think one useful application of this would be life built on stuff that doesn't interact with our cells - artifical bases, nucleotides and all. Then we could have non-biological self-replicating robots

I think its more intended for manufacturing.

Custom metabolic pathways to manufacture materials could be more easily implemented with cells that are fully synthetic.

If the entire cell is synthetic its more easy to simulate it's full behavior and then it's faster to iterate on it during development.

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