Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

quantamagazine.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 323 posts

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

#211

Post by jfengel »

FloorEgg wrote: post #174
bomewish wrote: post #173

The “from scratch” is doing a lot of work here!

I don't think I had ever heard the phrase "x is doing a lot of work here" until about a year ago, from Claude, which seems to say it's lot. Out of curiosity, do you use Claude a lot and did you pick up the saying from it? Are you Claude? Or just a coincidence?

It's a common enough expression. It has an entry in Wiktionary (sense 2):

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/do_a_lot_of_work

A random example from 1991:

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Object_oriented_Program...

Of course Claude picked it up from usage; it didn't invent the phrase. But I don't see any indication that it's uniquely Claude-y. I use the phrase on occasion myself.

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

#212

Post by dnautics »

gus_massa wrote: post #154
dnautics wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the left handed life thing is the only thing that makes me wonder about Adamala's judgement... there zero plausible mechanism for left handed life to succesfully compete. in case you didn't know, your immune system WILL detect left handed pathogens, possibly more aggressively, and two of the body's mechanisms for fighting infection -- fever and ozonolysis -- are distinctly achiral Arguably we should push for mirror l…

I agree. Nitpicking: > (they got nothing to eat) They can eat fats, that are not chiral. Perhaps they can eat some carbohidrates, all carbohidrates are chiral, but some bacterias may eat some of the unusual carbohidrates too. But amino acids are beyond any possibility, and fixating nitrogen is hard, so I also think they will starve to death very fast.

It's generally possible to epimerize l-amino acids to d- (or functionalize glycine) but you're competing with nonmirror life at that point. plus bacteria will love love love the d-alanine you make

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

#213

Post by [deleted] »

blorbthrow wrote: post #96

> '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…

[deleted]

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

#214

Post by r3trohack3r »

r0m4n0 wrote: post #74
small_model wrote: post #6

The aliens that seeded life on Earth are seeing us making baby steps. Expect a visit soon!

Or another take, life isn't all that special if we can make it this easily. We have always theorized the start of life but this could actively show that life could have started on a rock floating in space given enough time. No sky daddy and no aliens necessary!

You’re use of “easy” might be being biased by living at the brink after 1000s of years of technology development by our ancestors.

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

#215

Post by ranger_danger »

FloorEgg wrote: post #172
ranger_danger wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not defending anyone but it's quite common for people to hold different definitions of words with some unknown presumed context in mind that others don't see in the moment. I'd argue it's the single biggest reason for all arguments in recent human history.

This is a good reminder. It's frustrating because when trying to engage in intellectually curious dialog on HN sometimes people will attack my character and get upset because our perspectives seem to differ on the meaning of a specific word. When trying to reconcile the meaning sometimes people get upset and dismiss it as "that's just semantics". Semantics is the meaning of words... If our disagreement stems from dif…

Agreed. Another question I like to ask that is surprisingly revealing of people's intentions:

Are you interested in coming to a mutual understanding, or do you just want to be right?

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

#216

Post by im3w1l »

IAmBroom wrote: post #208
im3w1l wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have something so truly revolutionary that everyone can see with their own two eyes how awesome it is you don't have to rely on a middleman to bless it. "Ok your loss"

"everyone" is overly constrained. "The intended audience" is what is needed, and absolutely does require a middleman to publish it. No blessing required.

Distribution is trivially easy these days. All publishing does is say "yup, this is some legit science alright". It's a stamp of approval. Blessed by the publisher. To get this blessing you have to fulfil a set of requirements ranging from promoting good science to "thats just how its done, thats how we always done it" to the whims of a particular reviewer. You play the game you get the prize. But if you don't need the prize then you don't need to play.

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

#217

Post by wyldberry »

Lerc wrote: post #196
im3w1l wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have something so truly revolutionary that everyone can see with their own two eyes how awesome it is you don't have to rely on a middleman to bless it. "Ok your loss"

Nobody knows how another person will see something with their eyes. What appears to be obvious and revolutionary to one person may not be so to all. Review is precisely to protect against the importance and accuracy of a work being decided by the person who is most invested in it being so.

Whenever i sit down to read research, I remind myself of Lockheed Martin reading the USSR published research[0] on how electromagnetic waves scatter off of surfaces, and using that to fuel the initial stealth technology. The leading theory being that the USSR didn't recognize how brilliant and revolutionary ability these calculations were.

Just because I can't see the immediate brilliance, doesn't mean it is not brilliant in it's own right.

[0] - https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/how-soviet-union-acci...

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

#218

Post by noosphr »

bouchard wrote: post #79
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…

> “It’s an unusual way of doing things,” says Kerstin Göpfrich, a synthetic biologist at Heidelberg University. That's being kind; it's a complete overreaction, simply put.

It's an over reaction if you have a decade to argue with morons.

I've had papers sit in peer review for two years, get rejected, then when they are finally published the other editors of the journal that rejected them came crawling in asking for the next paper in the series and promising the front page. Worse they ran a news story about our paper _in the journal that rejected it_ saying how groundbreaking it was.

The only people who think peer review still works are people who have never used it or people who have never had a novel idea in their lives.

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

#219

Post by antonvs »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #128
hparadiz wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Exoplanets also aren't planets. Imagine writing this.

What they meant when they said "planets" was the 8 (previously 9, previously to that 8, previously 7...) known and named planets in our own solar system. A hypothetical "Journal of Planets" that was actually about solar system astronomy wouldn't necessarily have known what to do with a new paper about 51 Pegasi b published 30 years ago. They're thinking "when we said planets, we actually always meant solar system pla…

The argument you describe is as if Neil deGrasse Tyson took a course about “How to be even more extremely and inappropriately pedantic,” and decided he wanted to become the undisputed world expert at that.

Anyone who says “exoplanets aren’t planets” really needs to think a little harder about the actual meaning of what they’re saying.

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

#220

Post by tstactplsignore »

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…

The extremely obvious solution to this is just to preprint your own work before submitting it to a journal?

This has become the norm in science, and all of the best labs do it now, except for a few toxic holdouts who incorrectly believe preprinting their work will adversely impact its peer review.

Post reply on HN