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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

#281

Post by ben_w »

jibal wrote: post #202
ben_w wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's perfectly coherent to argue that gas giants should count failed stars rather than as planets, given the boundary between them is under debate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WISE_0855%E2%88%920714

It's perfectly irrelevant to the thread.

This thread is ~

  "Exoplanets also aren't planets": discuss
As the easiest to discover exoplanets (and all the early ones except pulsar planets) are gas giants, and the comment I was directly replying to had "Like a gas giant orbiting a star. It's obviously a planet", therefore "gas giants are failed stars and shouldn't count as planets" is not at all irrelevant.

Even further up to the point of if these are or are not cell, it illustrates how taxonomical categories are made by humans for humans. Historically, any connection to natural laws in taxonomies is often mere coincidence.

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

#282

Post by riffraff »

klustregrif wrote: post #228
noosphr wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I've had papers sit in peer review for two years, get rejected And for people who aren't in academia, lets just say the unspoken part: While one or more of the reviewers are actively trying to replicate the work so they can beat you to submission after rejecting you.

With the rise of pre-print archives is this still a problem?

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

#283

Post by riffraff »

root_axis wrote: post #264
hallway_monitor wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an outside observer, it does seem that the whole process is tedious, capricious, and corrupt. No wonder academia is crumbling - it deserves to, and it needs to be replaced with a new, better system.

> the whole process is tedious, capricious, and corrupt Is there any human institution under the sun that doesn't labor under a litany of such criticisms?

To paraphrase the science/funerals quip, one might say "Society advances one failed institution at a time".

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

#284

Post by vanderZwan »

Terr_ wrote: post #199
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…

You stumble across another article from 2226: It describes how the Earth was consumed by a grey-goo apocalypse of nanotechnology beyond human comprehension, so that no pore of its surface is untouched by reservoirs of rogue units, all of which are in a constant arms-race of development and combat. Some have formed groups that construct colossal moving megastructures piloted by inscrutable hive-minds. The article note…

The hive-mind reads another history article about how self destructive the various meta-hive-minds acted over the last centuries. While the critical self-reflection is justified, it thinks the non-hivemind versions weren't much better at first, stuck in a cycle of repeatedly nearly exterminating themselves with their own wasteful toxic oxygen for 800 million years, until some of them figured out how to use it for something.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20130124200735/https://www.pathe...

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

#285

Post by Gooblebrai »

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

Can't blame her if she wants her line of research to stay alive

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

#286

Post by noosphr »

cannonpr wrote: post #263
noosphr wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

We must live in different worlds, I’ve been literally blown away by the advances I’ve seen and the new research coming out in the past 40 years. In some ways it feels like we are just getting started, especially in bio. We finally have the tools to discover the wonderful nano machines that make up life and people are using them in wonderful ways.

It's only between 1920 and 1960 that you would have been literally blown away by scientific progress, first as we split the atom then fused it.

That you're impressed by the stamp collecting that science has become since then says a lot more about you than the state of scientific progress.

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

#287

Post by 0x1ceb00da »

fouc wrote: post #15
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…

Have you not seen Jurassic Park?

Have you not seen big shark?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2kCBlRZ4fA

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

#288

Post by japanuspus »

riffraff wrote: post #282
klustregrif wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've had papers sit in peer review for two years, get rejected And for people who aren't in academia, lets just say the unspoken part: While one or more of the reviewers are actively trying to replicate the work so they can beat you to submission after rejecting you.

With the rise of pre-print archives is this still a problem?

Yes - for the high profile journals (Science, Nature): Once it's public, you can forget everything about getting it accepted there.

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

#289

Post by throwaway676712 »

noosphr wrote: post #286
cannonpr wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We must live in different worlds, I’ve been literally blown away by the advances I’ve seen and the new research coming out in the past 40 years. In some ways it feels like we are just getting started, especially in bio. We finally have the tools to discover the wonderful nano machines that make up life and people are using them in wonderful ways.

It's only between 1920 and 1960 that you would have been literally blown away by scientific progress, first as we split the atom then fused it. That you're impressed by the stamp collecting that science has become since then says a lot more about you than the state of scientific progress.

The commenter was talking about biology and you are talking about physics. Just because your view of one field stagnates doesn't mean the rest of science doesn't, and your quip about stamp collecting (referring to that sneering quote) means you are thinking in memes and are not a serious interlocutor

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

#290

Post by oliverx0 »

noosphr wrote: post #218
bouchard wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “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…

I have always found this article on the matter quite revealing: https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-...
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