271–280 of 323 posts
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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.
No knowledge on this particular situation. My guess is that they wanted to protect their work by getting it out there. This prevents someone from stealing it during the peer review process.
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What are the implications for nanobots with this kind of innovation: Artificial cell division recreating itself in 2? Is this a future endeavor of this tech?
Great question - what we built isn't a "nanobot" in the Drexlerian sense (a tiny engineered machine assembling things atom by atom). It's a cell, it runs onn molecular machines like ribosomes, membranes, and enzymes. The self-replication and division you're picturing comes from that biological machinery copying and dividing, not from a mechanical device building a second copy of itself. So on your specific question:…
I think it will be a missed opportunity to not foresee manufacturing applications of "biological machinery". Enzymes have long been used in manufacturing, especially in chemistry. For the first time, ribosomes and membranes could be used as well.
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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.
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> we'd get better results with no process at all. I’m going to give some advice that you probably won’t understand for years, but when you don’t find value in a process you’re missing something about what it’s doing. A common shortcut is to look past who is making money to who is paying for that process and why they would want to pay for it.
In this case, the process is paid for by the government, and the reason they do it is that they wish to outsource the decision of which scientists on their payroll should be promoted. If you're willing to stipulate their goals, it's easy to understand why they appreciate this system. But there is no benefit to other parties. As far as society is concerned, this is a big loss and an unforced error.
The most critical function by far is it saves people doing research vast amounts of time. That includes people working at pharmaceutical companies, students, and non profits etc not just government employees. Thus why private colleges who don’t do cutting edge research as well as private labs etc still subscribe to such journals and thus fund the system.
This is a vast win for society. Could it be improved, sure, but you need to understand the value in order to build something that’s an actual improvement.
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You if believe creating life will end religion then you're wrong. We thought evolutionary theory would do the same, now we got people who believe god directed evolution. Some believe everything evolved from a common ancestor except Humans. So the believers will adapt to believe that Genesis was talking about exactly this.
Science can't disprove religion. Consider the "big bang", is that any less of a miracle than "God did it"? Science is like "just give us one miracle and we'll explain the rest".
Maybe less people believe that in modern times, but that's the exact point I was making. They'll find a way around to re-interpret scriptures.
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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 bril…
Extraornary claims should require extraornary proof, not a credulous audience.
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…
Crazy that a Cell reviewer would claim synthetic biology is not biology
They have just bolted an unsynchronized physicochemical process onto the boundary of the cell. It doesn't coordinate with anything to do with the cell. Both cells don't get half of the dna. They built stochastic chemical scissors that only work if you make the cell less cell-like.
I;m one of the co-founders, AMA :)