“This was where the field had been stuck for some time. Researchers before Adamala had figured out different ways to feed and grow synthetic cells and to replicate their DNA. But cell division is a different beast. A typical cell reorganizes its cytoskeleton — a network of protein fibers that provide structural support — to halve its DNA and split. Synthetic biologists could not figure out how to get their cells to undergo this complex process.
So Adamala decided to ditch the cytoskeleton. One day, while tearing through the literature, she came across an interesting mechanism in a paper (opens a new tab). By attaching protein tags to a cell membrane, the synthetic biologist Reinhard Lipowsky (opens a new tab) at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces attracted other proteins to crowd around and physically bend the membrane, forcing the cell to divide. Following this approach, Adamala tweaked a cell-membrane protein and tested it in her protocells. After several tries, it worked.“
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.
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 assess it. She says her group will submit it to a new journal soon. “It’s an unusual way of doing things,” says Kerstin Göpfrich, a synthetic biologist at Heidelberg University.
My paper demonstrating a side channel attack on RSA via hyperthreading was rejected from the crypto preprint archive on the basis that it was "not cryptography".
(Reviewers at J.Crypto subsequently sat on it for a year and then suggested I submit it to a journal on CPU microarchitecture instead.)
Novel research is uniquely susceptible to "cool but it's not part of our field", because that critique is entirely correct until the research gets published!
our paper to a database venue about bringing GPU support to Presto was rejected. one of the reviewers wrote, and I quote verbatim: "the topic of the paper is too practical". I just couldn't help but laughed at it.
Or perhaps they wanted something theoritical that advances the state of the art in database design and architecture (which is the whole purpose of academic reasearch/conference/etc) - not merely some report describing doing something that's already been done for a different DB.
Condescending? That's the mission of a scientific journal / conference / etc. Doesn't mean practical development work is "less worthy", but it's not a fit for them.
I disagree. I think it's very important to see how can those papers be turned into real things. Rejecting something for too practical is a joke, and if I ever find out who gave us that review, I'll have a talk with them.
Looking over Journal of Cryptology, they appear to be a theory journal. So an attack on an implementation, based on hardware probably doesn't interest them as much.
They publish lots of papers about side channel attacks, including very hardware based ones like power consumption analysis.
It just happened that "leak information into microarchitectural state and then retrieve it" didn't exist as a subfield until my work (and the OST work a few weeks behind mine).
Frankly, there's no way any arch venue at the time would have done anything beyond rejecting it with "caches make RSA fast, what's the problem?"
Security wasn't something CPU designers paid much attention to, and cryptography wasn't something they were even particularly aware of. Even seven years ago, when an Intel VP was giving a talk at re:Invent about "processor technologies for improving security in virtual machines", my question to him about cache collision side channel attacks was met with "what's a side channel attack?"
It's because really what they are doing is using chemistry to split a cell. Adamala is a chemist.
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.
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.
That's fair, but rejecting a paper for that reason seems excessive to me. Even if the reviewer may think that synthetic biology is not biology, they would know that plenty of synthetic biology papers have been published in Cell.
> for people to hold different definitions of words [...] is the single biggest reason for all arguments in recent human history.
IMO this extremely, extraordinarily true. And in my experience, it's somehow even more true for disagreements among scientists. Even though every scientific field is, in some sense, about defining a shared set of extremely precise jargon. (I recall two very well-respected scientists screaming at each other about the definition of "acidity" for instance)
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 differing opinions on what the word means how else can we reconcile or discuss the topic constructively?
The last time this happened I think the crux of the debate was the meaning of "unconstrained capitalism". Pretty sure the other person and I agreed on everything (values wise) except the precise meaning of that term, and the misunderstanding led them to accuse me of being unsavory.
These exchanges tend to discourage me from engaging in HN for a while.
Yeah, I have a hard time reconciling this especially since biology and biologic research often involves things like enzymes which both aren't alive and are synthetically created.
I'm certain cell magazine has published articles on novel enzyme discovery.
Exoplanets also aren't planets. Some things just seem to have definitions with a history that get applied to new discoveries that don't fall within the definition. Distinguishing random rocks in space from planets was done by requiring planets to orbit around the sun, and so planets elsewhere cannot be called planets no matter that it's 1:1 the same thing. Biology probably has a similar history of trying to draw a line somewhere between what was created and what evolved to be part of the 'natural' world
Exoplanets are planets. Also, for clarification, biology is not defined as “the study of things produced exclusively by natural evolution.” Synthetic biology works with biological components and living systems (DNA, proteins, regulatory networks, cells and organisms). It differs from much traditional biology mainly in its constructive, engineering-oriented approach. Synthetic systems are often built precisely to test hypotheses about how natural biological systems function. Claiming it is not biology is wrong IMO.
For anyone else that might be curios, the definition of a planet you will often see quoted online applies to bodies in our Solar System. It comes from the International Astronomical Union in 2006. This is the famous definition that dropped Pluto as a planet. While the criteria are widely quoted, that actual resolution isn't. The resolution:
The IAU...resolves that planets and other bodies, except satellites, in the Solar System be defined into three distinct categories in the following way:
(1) A planet [1] is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit.
(2) A "dwarf planet" is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape [2], (c) has not cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit, and (d) is not a satellite.
(3) All other objects [3], except satellites, orbiting the Sun shall be referred to collectively as "Small Solar System Bodies".
The definition here only applies to bodies in the Solar System.
Still a bad definition IMO. According to the definition if a catastrophic event were to occur that cluttered the neighborhood of a planet it would cease to be a planet until it was cleaned up. The definition of a planet should be based in the physical attributes of the celestial body itself, not in its role or relationship with other bodies. I'm a bit of an extremist on this front. Even our Moon would be a planet in my opinion. Seems silly when you think about our barren moon but there are for sure habitable moons out there. I can't imagine asking an alien "What planet are you from?" and them responding "erm, actually we are from a moon/planetary satellite".
And notice how we have those two different words - mother and woman? You can have words that describe relationships, in fact that is really good! You can even compound words or create whole new ones to encompass multiple types of attributes! What we should avoid is taking widely used words and changing the definition to add a criterion that is of a whole other type of attribute.
Your mother and woman example is perfect! It would not be appropriate to most people to change the definition of woman to a female that had or has an offspring. You are taking a definition that describes an attribute of the subject (gender) and throwing in criteria that is based on a relationship. That makes no sense!
If it is important for you to make a distinction on whether an astronomical body has cleared its neighborhood then you can create a new word or compound word.
The GP post's point was that, logical as this would be, the IAU definition explicitly states that planets are "in the Solar System". So no, exoplanets are exoplanets, not planets. And Pluto isn't an example of either.
No, The IAU definition does not say that. You and others are confusing the definition of a planet with its application to planets in the solar system (and thus to Pluto) --
IAU Resolution 5A: Definition of a Planet in the Solar System.
The IAU of course does not assert that only planets in the solar system are planets ... that would be ridiculous, and the interpretation of the IAU's stance as being so ridiculous is ridiculous and then some.
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 planets, it just never came up until now".
The reviewer of this paper is saying that by biology they always meant naturally evolved cellular biology, not synthetic biology - there's just never been an example of the latter before.
I think the take is wrong, the receiving journals should be excited to expand their scope rather than frustratedly redefine their scope more narrowly, but definitions and categorization are hard.
Who is "they", and how do you know what they meant?
The relevant fact is that the claim "Exoplanets also aren't planets" is simply wrong -- exoplanets are by definition planets outside the solar system. It's like claiming that a brown furple isn't a furple -- the claim is wrong, regardless of what one thinks a furple is.
> The reviewer of this paper is saying that by biology they always meant naturally evolved cellular biology, not synthetic biology - there's just never been an example of the latter before.
> exoplanets are by definition planets outside the solar system. It's like claiming that a brown furple isn't a furple -- the claim is wrong, regardless of what one thinks a furple is.
If only language was so logical.
While I happen to agree that exoplanets are planets, as with my point in the other comment, I aver the stronger claim ("regardless") does not follow in this context.
Stonehenge, after which the concept of a henge is named, does not meet the current archeological definition of a henge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henge
Chinese checkers is German and plays nothing like checkers. Peanuts are not nuts, strawberries are not berries, hamburgers do not generally contain ham, a killer whale is actually a dolphin, etc.
I don't need an off topic point-missing lecture on how language works that could have and might as well have been written by a clanker. The fact remains that exoplanets are by definition a type of planet, regardless of whether Jerusalem artichokes are a type of artichoke -- proper names as adjectives work differently, and the "mincemeat" example is simply bad faith ... actually, the whole pushback here is bad faith argumentation.
And "gas giants are failed stars and shouldn't count as planets" is completely irrelevant -- at best it's a fallacy of denial of the antecedent.
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.
Actually, that is the IAU stance. And their definition for exoplanet includes small, non-rounded objects orbiting stars which would be asteroids (or comets or whatever) if they happened to be around the Sun.
All that debacle around dwarf planets to prepare for future observations, and yet the distinction ceases to apply the moment you go outside the Oort cloud...
But really, that's just the naming systems being bad, obviously common people don't think asteroids around other stars are "exoplanets" or should be called that way
I'm not talking about edge cases like asteroids or planetoids or dwarf planets. I'm talking about actual planets. Like a gas giant orbiting a star. It's obviously a planet even if it's not orbiting Sol.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
Understanding how a bunch of baroque proteins interact is the definition of stamp collecting. As a meat bag made up of such machines
I appreciate it for what it is. As a intelligence capable of abstraction I don't measure our progress in science by the number of stamps in our collection.
There are no big ideas, biology included, because peer review is only there for small ideas.
"Co-author" lol we both know what that means. Still, if that's true that makes it even sadder. Hope you mature and broaden your horizons at some point instead of engaging in undergrad-style petty field rivalries
What does this mean “it’s the left that’s the problem”? The right’s solution to academic reform is literal pseudoscience. And I don’t mean this as whataboutism—I’m responding to the implication that some political faction other than the left has the right answer, and I don’t know who that would be.
> Anyone pointing out the obvious - that peer review is broken and science hasn't worked in 40 years - is at best a flat Earther.
Yes, if someone claims that science hasn't worked (what does it even mean?) for 40 years then he's not that far from being flat Eather. It's hard to expect other side to be reasonable while making such absurd claims.
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.
There are other quotes that do think it’s significant. Why do you think the more critical scientists are more correct?
> John Glass, a synthetic biologist at the J. Craig Venter Institute in La Jolla, Calif., who was not involved in the study. “It is dazzling that she has put these things all together,” he said.
> “We’re going to remember this moment,” said Roseanna Zia, a computational biologist at the University of Missouri who was not involved in the project.
Maybe you prefer scientists who put their money where their mouth is (even if that’s a conflict of interest)
> When Dr. Adamala showed SpudCell to Dr. Endy… (a synthetic biologist at Stanford University) … last year, he was so awestruck that he decided to help her found Biotic, the nonprofit organization intended to create a community of SpudCell researchers. “I’m pouring my life’s work into this,” Dr. Endy said.
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.
You’re mistaken in thinking it’s paid for by the government, though yes many governments are collectively a significant funding source they are far from the only funding source here.
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.
>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
Who do you believe should be the gatekeeper here? Why can’t the scientist and the news outlets be trusted to make the decision about whether to publish or not themselves? Why can’t the general public be trusted to evaluate the quality of the news outlets they read?
> Why can’t the scientist and the news outlets be trusted to make the decision about whether to publish or not themselves? Why can’t the general public be trusted to evaluate the quality of the news outlets they read?
Because the scientists involved and reporters manifestly do a bad job about picking what is or isn’t groundbreaking and more importantly have various incentives to hype things up.
CERN scientists with the whole FTL neutrino particle were actively skeptical of the results and still held a press conference on the topic. As to reporters, you’re welcome to go through the published stories about the topic and notice how rarely getting the distance wrong was brought up even when the scientists involved where skeptical. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_OPERA_faster-than-light_n...
The general public is utterly incompetent at judging science. Homeopathy is the tip of the iceberg of ignorance.
You didn’t answer the actually interesting question I posed, who should be the gatekeeper instead?
Yes, yes, journalists and scientists have bad incentives and the general public is dumb. You’re not exactly setting the world on fire with that observation. The problem is that there is no better alternative. Any conceivable gatekeeper to scientific knowledge will be no smarter than the research scientists producing the results and will certainly have problematic incentives of their own. And a gatekeeper will also lack the local knowledge that might determine whether the information might helpful or harmful to the potential reader.
Programming reinvented a similar system of peer review before commits. It’s not that the reviewer is more knowledgeable about the bits of the system being changed that makes this work it’s that they have enough expertise to understand what’s involved and a new set of eyes on the problem.
In science having multiple journals acts as a safety valve here, but the underlying principle is very similar. As much as some people bad mouth it, peer review is a very low hurdle before publication that still catches a great number of mistakes.
> 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.
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"
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.
There is a similar story with the discovery of buckey-balls. A researcher at University of Houston had data that demonstrated buckey-balls were created, but he didn't fully understand what he was looking at. Then a researcher at Rice saw the data and recognized c-60 was being created, so he bought the data and the process and then "invented" carbon balls
I'm not suggesting you tell no-one about your ideas, but if you can't convince people who know the field, turning to laypeople instead is the hallmark of a crank.
Extraornary claims should require extraornary proof, not a credulous audience.
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.
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 nearly identical experiments and gets slightly better results. They push onto a pre-pub server and immediately get it into a tier-1 venue. They are now state of the art. You are now merely the person reproducing original work.
My wife has had numerous papers rejected because the reviewer belonged to a competing lab. Took a few tries and a request to exclude a certain reviewer and hey presto! published!
As common as pedophilia in priests: IOW, despite anyone's "feel" or "gut impression", probably the exact same distribution as in the general population.
Nothing about belief in the RC church nor education of the priests filters for pedophilia, despite lots of loose opinions. Priests, plumbers, and people who live in Scarsdale are all generally equally likely to be pedophiles. (There are meaningful filters, like man versus woman.)
Nothing about pursuing an academic career selects for or filters against dishonesty. I've seen astounding dishonesty in published papers; I've seen admirable examples of morality as well.
Hard to say but my impression is that most academics are honest and would try not to do this, but also there are rivalries between labs and that tends to encourage "everything they do is bad and we're great" mentalities so it's definitely not surprising.
Too common, unfortunately. Publishing and getting public credit like this are considered high stakes (which justify, or at least make some sense of occurring despicableness). There is much too much infighting over nothing (compared to the money in the corporate world).
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.
Because it does, the review process is now no longer double blind. And I disagree, I think there is no obvious solution - though I would venture to guess that publishing the reviewer's names alongside their reviews upon rejection would be a better step towards a healthy discourse.
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.
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 relic.
For productive matters, Biotec preferes to rely on its biomachines. Imagine drones giving birth to offspring when traffic is at a peak. It takes more energy, sure. But no factory, nor workers are needed.
If left alone, machines would multiply out of control, instead of rotting to waste like in the olden days.
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 notes that this event actually occurred ~3.5 billion years ago, and suggests that the current hive-mind should buy a subscription.
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.
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.
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
Humans have the power to self reproduce though. I don’t believe anything short of an engineered disease could wipe out all of humanity at this point and it has to happen soon before we figure out how to fix all of our problems using genetic engineering.
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.
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 life for industrial purposes FASTER because biocontrol is easier (they got nothing to eat) and lab escape is far less likely
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
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?
> Biotic is a public-benefit nonprofit research organization developing chemically and functionally defined synthetic cells. Biotic's mission is to responsibly enable and steward foundational advances in bioengineering. Our goal is to ensure that all people and the planet benefit from world‑leading biotechnologies soon enough to matter. We conduct and support public‑benefit research ranging from foundational science to how people interact with biotechnology.
It looks like this particular research is conducted at the University of Minnesota
Layman, so bear with me. I'm wondering where they got the amino acids and proteins from? I was under the impressino that cells needed them to be "homochiral" to function, and the artificial 'built from scratch' amino acids are 50:50 of each chirality.
In my reading of the NYTimes simplification of this story they mention that the genes were "borrowed from a virus and the ubiquitous microbe Escherichia coli".
Mainly just curious how far they managed to get to the 'from scratch' goal.
Or is what they've done a bit more of an assembly of bits and pieces? Cheers all.
Hi, thanks, and very cool work (assuming it eventually holds up in peer review)!
A few things that confused me while trying to read the paper:
- There's two different methods of cell division mentioned -- mechanical extrusion and the autonomous, protein-driven division. Most of the results (e.g. the five generations) focus on the mechanically driven one, while the autonomous one is more "lifelike". Does the autonomous division have a higher failure rate, or can you get the same results with it as well?
- It's mentioned that the bottleneck for survival of many generations is ribozomes degrading, but also that ribozomes are supplied from the outside. Do the degraded ribozomes actively harm the cell? Or is there some other reason why they cannot be replenished?
- You say that after 5 generations, only 30% of the cells have the correct genome, and it's presented like a problem -- but 30% of 2^5 is more than 10, so this sounds like more than enough for continued survival. Is there something missing in this train of thought? Perhaps other failures that can kill the cell?
And some questions about the implications:
- Do you think that the genome you use is already close to minimal? AFAIK a lot of the minimal organisms found in the wild are parasites of some sort, getting most of their complex molecules from the outside, which is a similar spirit to this (a rich medium and the cell "just" self-duplicating). If the multiple plasmids are causing trouble (per the previous point), would it make sense to try and get rid of some of them?
- Are those minimal genes somehow interpretable -- as in "you need functions X, Y, and Z and cannot avoid them by using a better medium"?
- Do you think this is a plausible stage of very early life?
The current model, of a cell that cannot live on its own and cannot evolve (being too far from "edge of chaos") is what will be most useful for bio-engineering. Yes, we need the mechanism for creating cells, and the newfound division for a minimum viable cell is paramount. But, we also need for ways to control its reproduction, be it as to die out on its own after few generations due to degraded protein build-up, or (in the best case scenario) due to some other built in mechanism. Otherwise, expect (at least) some amount of scaremongering, about playing fast and loose with things that may get out of hand. The best thing is to have this kind of cell template that could somehow be augmented with whatever additional plug-in functionality (useful for us, case by case) and then get it produced in the needed quantities and not more. The research direction that makes sense is for ways to add such "mission specific" functions to this synthetic cell and ways to create the first generation as efficiently as possible, at large scale. That's it.
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: division is very much a core goal of the synthetic cell field, and getting a built-from-defined-parts system to grow and divide reliably on its own is one of the big open problems ahead of us. What SpudCell demonstrates is assembling something cell-like from well-defined components.
Where this does connect to the "programmable matter" dream is that if you can engineer a cell from the ground up, you can in principle program what it makes and does, using biology's own manufacturing stack rather than trying to invent a mechanical one from scratch. That's a slower and messier path than the sci-fi version, but it's the one that actually runs on physics we think we understand.. hope it makes sense!
> The self-replication and division you're picturing comes from that biological machinery copying and dividing
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.
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 sister chromatids apart from each other. After the chromosomes separate, other cytoskeletal filaments (actin and myosin) form a contractile ring, which tightens to create a cleavage furrow. The membrane pinches inward until the cell splits in two.
Bacteria work slightly differently, since they don't have a eukaryotic cytoskeleton, but they do have cytoskeletal-like proteins (FtsZ), since they divide by building the cell wall inward (I am not an expert on bacteria lol).
SpudCell doesn't have a cytoskeleton, so instead it relies on a physical membrane-rupture strategy. It makes membrane proteins from its own DNA (a-hemolysin), which inserts into the membrane. They help fuse with feeder liposomes for growth. For division, these proteins crowd on the membrane surface, creating mechanical stress which leads to membrane instability, which then splits on its own.
The complexity is certainly awesome, however there are all kinds of "free lunches" that we can take advantage of here, I'm paraphrasing (and glazing) Mike Levin here - when you work with biological systems, you are handling an agential material that naturally expresses itself.
I suspect that, once scientists lean more into the right kind of communication with these systems that many substantial leaps forward will be made. I am very excited about it too, mostly because I think it has the potential to positively impact how we see ourselves (humans) in the natural world.
And the synthetic cell doesn't need to do anything about separating genetic material between daughter cells because it's just free-floating DNA that is likely to be in both parts. Right?
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.
This is so cool! I had once gone in the rabbit-hole of finding artificial life and there were experiments which did multiple phases but none which did the whole thing and I was left wondering why. I am a bit happy to see that someone was working on it (and succeeded!)
There is another submission on Hackernews which talks about: The first early human eggs from stem cells[0] which is an interesting discussion to read through on hackernews as well.
Layman question. How can they determine that the cell divided in a reproducing/growing fashion rather than due to mechanical or other external means because of the methodology they used to trigger the act of breaking up? Or does it not matter in living cells either?
There are multiple FDA-approved lab-grown meats on the market. You can literally go to a handful of restaurants and order lab-grown meat today. The production process is just expensive and it's getting scaled out.
Lab-grown meat seems completely unrelated to synthetic biology. For lab grown meat the problem to my knowledge is that it is very expensive to grow vertebrate cells in the absence of an immune system because every contamination kills the batch.
I vastly prefer the explanation like of Roadside Picnic. They didn't try to create us, they don't care that we're here, and, ultimately, we will never be able to know them in any meaningful sense. ;)
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!
This is great, I assumed we were getting close (and not quite there), so it's great to see the progress. The path from here to building a single-celled organism out of nonlive materials looks very straight.
Scientists seem really busy these days creating synthetic life: advances in AI, human eggs from stem cells and now this - synthetic cells. I somehow feel they are inspired by the Alien movies.
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.
"doing a lot of work" and "doing a lot of the heavy-lifting" are and have been somewhat common on reddit, etc. I guess it's a great source for LLMs for weighting, because the weighting is largely done for you via upvotes. Something search engines love as well.
The weighting-by-upvotes is why there was a short period when Google's AI search results (I'm not 100% clear on whether that was Gemini, or a different model) would tell you to use white glue to keep the cheese from falling off your pizza. Because that was shortly after they had bought Reddit's data set, and they hadn't yet gone in and filtered out "upvoted because it's useful info" from "upvoted because it's hilarious". And the Reddit post recommending white glue to keep the cheese from falling off your pizza had gotten thousands of "man, that's hilarious, I love it" upvotes.
> “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 imagine?
Yes, mechanically constructing life would be absolutely stupendous for science. The real tragedy of modern sci-fi is that everyone read the books and decided it was reality.
“Penicillin?! A poison from fungus that kills living cells?! Haven’t you played the sci fi game The Last of Us?”
Stories are stories, man. Story-logic is biased towards interesting tales. And “discovery from the natural world turned to human aims with great results” is uninteresting because we do amazing things these days.
I don't spend any time on LW but perhaps that is because I'll have to face that all my ideas have already been explored more eloquently by him and the communities he's part of.
I think the issue is that those stories are rooted very much in the failures of human systems that we see every day. They are us imagining what could go wrong based on what has gone wrong and is going wrong.
It would be a lot easier to set those warnings aside if we didn't have so many examples of the very things they warn about happening in real life.
We currently have a system where private individuals can fund private science and then deploy the results globally to their own profit with very few mechanisms for enforcing restraint and caution. And we've seen this backfire with horrific consequences over and over again.
Lead in the gasoline. Microplastics in the water. Pesticides widely applied to the biosphere. In my area PCBs are a massive risk due to past soil contamination. In other areas fracking biproducts make the water undrinkable.
Hell the AI rush in the face of climate change. We literally have heatwaves killing massive numbers of people while a tiny handful of investors and the companies they control are drastically increasing our carbon emissions in the race for AI.
It's easy to imagine all the ways in which synthetic life could go horribly wrong, even with out those sci-fi stories, especially since all but the youngest of us have been through a brutal pandemic in living memory.
It's very, very hard to imagine our current system showing proper restraint with this technology.
Ever since the industrial revolution, humanity has stumbled from one environmental disaster to the other.
Heavy metals, CFCs, acid rain, radioactive elements that don't occur naturally, microplastics, PFAS, large scale oil spills, greenhouse gasses, deforestation, over-fishing, species extinction, the list goes on & on.
And in each case, early warnings are ignored & the harmful activity is only curbed many decades after deployment at scale, when environmental harm becomes too serious to ignore.
Imho AI is no exception to this rule. Its energy usage alone adds to CO2 emissions at a time those should be reduced. Higher efficiency says anyone? No! Higher productivity. Read: same # of humans can consume even bigger amount of resources per time unit.
Yeah I can envision the wonders AGI/ASI could bring to humanity. But as deployed right now, it mostly helps to worsen a number of problems in human society (CO2 emissions, wealth inequality, concentration of economic/political power, to name a few).
Synthetic life? Absolutely, would be a fantastic scientific milestone. But could also turn into yet another eco disaster.
It's important to emphasize that cars are the leading source of carbon emissions. Anyone fighting against AI on the basis of climate change should be fighting for safe and reliable alternatives to driving everywhere.
This is "whatabboutism" which is a logical fallacy.
Someone doesn't have to talk about the climate impacts of cars every time they talk about the climate impacts of AI. Both have climate impacts, independently of each other, and we should be dealing with the climate impacts of both simultaneously.
Regardless, don't assume the person you are talking to isn't consistent. Peruse my personal blog and you will see that I, in fact, ran a whole city council campaign on a platform of "to fight climate change we should not be driving".
> This is "whatabboutism" which is a logical fallacy.
No it isn't. You don't optimize a piece of software by profiling it and rendering a flame graph, and then ignoring the sections of code that the most time is being spent in. You work on optimizing the paths where the most time is being spent, because that is where your effort has the most room for impact. If we are trying to optimize carbon emissions instead of time, we look at the biggest sources of emissions first, because that's where our effort has the most room for impact.
> Someone doesn't have to talk about the climate impacts of cars every time they talk about the climate impacts of AI.
I never said they did. I said they should be fighting both if they actually care about the issue.
> Peruse my personal blog and you will see that I, in fact, ran a whole city council campaign on a platform of "to fight climate change we should not be driving".
Excellent, you are fighting both because you care about the issue. Thank you for your service.
Someone doesn't have to talk about the climate impacts of cars every time they talk about the climate impacts of AI.
Actually they do, because the best way to get cars off the road is to replace many if not most of their occupants with AI.
Private ownership of cars is not the problem. The assumption that people have to drive all over the place to get stuff done is the problem. Let's work on that.
> the best way to get cars off the road is to replace many if not most of their occupants with AI.
I'm so confused by this. Instead of one person driving a car to the store and parking, now the car is driving itself to the store with one person in it, dropping them off, and then either parking, or driving itself around more, back to the house or to a distant parking facility. In crowded cities, the car is just going to drive around the block empty for an hour instead of paying $12 for parking. Single-occupancy vehicles are a big problem now; I don't understand how introducing a bunch of zero-occupancy vehicles are an improvement on that? It seems very obvious to me self-driving cars are going to significantly increase the total number of miles driven every day in the world.
I didn't say anything about self-driving cars. You still need to go to the store, if you don't get your stuff delivered by someone who is (hopefully) delivering to more than one house.
You don't need to go to the office. Neither does your car.
And the most promising of those alternatives is, ironically enough, AI itself. Fighting data centers is literally like fighting nuclear power. If you just want more carbon emissions, then by all means, proceed.
Of course most people who commute to work don't need to be doing that now, but that's the other big elephant in the room with AI. We don't use the intelligence we already have, so what makes us think the emergence of ASI/AGI will change anything?
The most promising alternative is making it legal to build housing near where people want to be (commercial districts) and make it legal to build places people want to be near where they live (build cafes, shops, etc in suburbia). Any help that AI could have on the situation would just as easily be applied to working from home without AI.
That’s just wrong. Transportation is 24% of carbon emissions with 18% road transportation and about 10% of that from cars. Electricity and heat production is the largest source of carbon emissions.
> cars are the leading source of carbon emissions.
WTF? cars are less than 7% and even including trucks we are barely around 11%. when you look at greenhouse effect instead of "just carbon", the percentages are even tinier.
If you are looking for leading sources of climate change look at electricity/heat, industry and agriculture.
just because (bad) politicians are always talking about cars when talking about climate it doesn't mean the are actually a meaningful component. it is smoke and mirros…
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
but those guys could probably add components to their cell to make it truly self-supporting although in biology there is a big difference between "barely works" and "high performance"
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.
At one end we're creating artificial life, the other we are creating artificial intelligence.
We're coming at everything we as the human race have known for millennia from both ends, simultaneously. We're recreating that, from scratch.
That is absolutely fucking wild.
Ironically this "holy" grail will end up being the thing that finally puts religious creation myths in their place (i.e. as bullshit) since we will be able to answer with 100% certainty that we are not alone or unique in the universe since we recreated life in the fucking petri dish so why not across the billions and trillions of other planets out there?
> we will be able to answer with 100% certainty that we are not alone or unique in the universe since we recreated life in the fucking petri dish
I don't think we are alone, but this is not logically sound. The conditions in the petri dish might be easily so special that their natural prevalence is < 1 per universe.
The first time this happens in a petri dish will likely have to be under extremely controlled circumstances. But the process will be modified and toyed with once it exists and I think that this will eventually lead to whole spectrum of (quasi?)biological systems that together cover a broad range of environmental conditions.
> Ironically this "holy" grail will end up being the thing that finally puts religious creation myths in their place (i.e. as bullshit) since we will be able to answer with 100% certainty that we are not alone or unique in the universe since we recreated life in the fucking petri dish so why not across the billions and trillions of other planets out there?
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.
> Who thought evolutionary theory would end religion?
Some terribly ill-informed people have. Plus ca change. Sadly, the experience of "Christianity" of many Americans is either caricature or some kind of novel and vulgar fundamentalism they grew up around that sprouted on American soil in the last century or two. Add to that the black legends supplied by the Enlightenment and others and you have a perfect storm of malicious ignorance.
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".
That depends on which religion, doesn't it. The categorical claim doesn't make any sense, because the general notion of "religion" doesn't entail anything that is inherently at odds with science. And if there is a normative sense of what is or isn't religion, then this is even more true, because normativity means there is a correct religion or most correct religion, and you can't be correct without being true.
Some religious traditions, however, do make claims that are wide open to scientific discreditation (like the "Lamanite hypothesis" of Mormonism).
The big bang theory isn't even incompatible with the idea that 'God did it'; the idea was first proposed by a Catholic priest, as a matter of fact! I think the anti-science stance of evangelicals has eclipsed in the modern consciousness the fact that modern science owes much to the Catholic church.
> This startling idea first appeared in scientific form in 1931, in a paper by Georges Lemaître, a Belgian cosmologist and Catholic priest.
I think this is really the wrong framing. Science can't disprove religion. The question is whether it makes any sense to believe in the religion in the first place, given what observation and science say about the universe. Science can't prove that God didn't create the universe a nano-second ago in exactly the state to produce this temporal evolution, but no one believes that because its not explanatory and also fails a bunch of other, not-necessarily scientific, but rationally motivated epistemological tests.
The way I see this is that science cannot disprove any particular religion, but it can probably offer more compelling explanations for the state of the world than religion can offer. People haven't flocked away from religion because explanations for the state of the world aren't really what people want from religion. They want a sop for their anxieties. they want community, etc. I think believing in nonsense is a real shitty way to get these things, but I'm not most people.
(Disclaimer: on religion I try to be respectful, as an agnostic atheist) I do think our ability to “build tools that create life” is incredible, but to me has a limited argumentative impact on what I guess you could call the “prime mover” question: _But how did everything start?_ Does that seem reasonable or am I downplaying the implications you mentioned?
Thomas Aquinas made the argument that all life comes from other life in the 13th Century. I wouldn't classify it as a modern pivot so much as one of the central philosophical arguments for the existence of a Creator.
Not really. AI isn't intelligent by any stretch. To make that claims requires ignorance of what constitutes "intelligence", especially the most essential element of intelligence, viz., intensionality. LLMs or expert system or whatever absolutely lack intensionality by definition because computation is by definition a purely syntactic process.
> Ironically this "holy" grail will end up being the thing that finally puts religious creation myths in their place
I think you're way out of your depth here and making things up. The first tell is that you use "religion" as a blanket term as if all religious traditions make the same claims, which they absolutely do not. You can discredit, say, Mormonism much more easily than, say, Islam (though, ironically, there is a strange structural similarity between the two).
> we will be able to answer with 100% certainty that we are not alone or unique in the universe since we recreated life [..] so why not across the billions and trillions of other planets out there?
Who exactly claims that human beings or, generally, life on earth is the only life in the universe? None of the major religions do. I'm also going to assume that Christianity (or some caricature of it) is for you the paradigmatic reference point of what constitutes "religion", in which case there is nothing in Christian theology that excludes the possibility of life - even embodied intelligent life - elsewhere in the universe. (The latter is actually interesting from an ontological perspective. If the definition of "human" is "rational animal", then by definition, all rational animals are human. So, from an ontological perspective, even if an intelligent, phylogenetically distinct species were to be found on another planet, ontologically, they would also be human.)
Yeah, imagine if one day it will become trivial to blow up the world. Enough people hate humanity that they would do it, by tomorrow if they could. Seems like out exponential growth in technology will eventually lead up to that. If not actual nuclear explosion, then biological weapons. Would we need to enslave humans not to do it. How would that work.
I agree with your conclusion. We start by enslaving certain classes of humans like Peter Thiel or Elon Musk. Anyone with more than $1B gets the collar. Populism is a helluva drug.
If you can disassemble and reassemble a thing, you can say you understand it. Not perfectly. But understand it. I’d imagine properly understanding rudimentary cellular biology will come with perks.
(Also, does the Holy Grail imply both a boon and a cost? Or is that just Indian Jones.)
While this is an impressive step forward, there remains an extremely long way, probably of several decades, until being able to design and synthesize a cell comparable in complexity with a bacterium.
The thing that they made is more alive than a crystal, which when placed in a suitable solution will grow and reproduce its own structure, but much less alive than even the simplest known living cells.
Its "life" is similar to that of a brain-dead human, whose body is not left to die by a bunch of machines that pump air into its lungs and nutrients through its blood vessels.
The techniques developed to make this pseudo-cell might evolve eventually into techniques able to make a true cell and it is likely that valuable information can be extracted from experiments with it, but it is very unlikely that any of the ancestors of the living beings has ever had even a remote resemblance with this (because it is far too dependent on continuously receiving complex cellular components and nutrients from outside; simplified parasitic living beings could appear only when there already existed sufficiently complex living hosts for the parasites).
Some components of this thing are growing by reproducing themselves, but like I have said, so does any crystal, thus it is difficult to choose a criterion that will distinguish with certainty what is living from what is non-living.
The growth is followed by a kind of division into 2 vesicles, but that happens by a mechanism very different from any living cell. Many inorganic things will split when growing over a certain size, so again it is hard to decide whether this can be called living.
> Its "life" is similar to that of a brain-dead human, whose body is not left to die by a bunch of machines that pump air into its lungs and nutrients through its blood vessels
A brain-dead human is alive, but just facing systemic collapse, aka death. That's not to imply that what the scientists here have created is alive, but the comparison isn't so apt.
As a multi-cellular organism, a brain-dead human is not alive, even if most of its cells may remain alive as long as they are fed from outside.
OK, what I have said above is not generally true, as some brain-dead humans may be more alive than others, e.g. some integrative functions, like some feedback loops that function through the endocrine system or through the autonomous nervous system, may still be working, connecting some organs with each other.
My comparison was with a very dead brain-dead human, who was reduced to the equivalent of a tissue culture.
These artificial cells also have some components that continue to work like in a living cell, doing some nucleic acid replication and some protein and lipid synthesis from precursors provided from outside, but they lack the capability to perform many of the chemical reactions that would be needed to close the complex network of feedback loops that enable a true living cell to live autonomously.
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
Interesting. I pasted the article URL into Claude Opus 4.8, along with some questions about uses for cells that couldn't reproduce and Claude thought about it for a while, and then got murdered by the guardrails. I was invited to edit the question and try again; in a different chat. Or use a dumber model.
I suppose I can see why. But at the time I was just curious about the idea of "mule" cells.
I'm curious what you asked? I had Opus 4.8 ingest the URL and give me some ideas about what's possible and it eventually got to AI and self repairing/improving factories along with listing risks etc.
"The idea of a cell that didn't reproduce at all occurred to me. Maybe created by a factory cell. It would be used to change an environment or produce some useful compound. I can imagine manufacturing them to process chemicals, or create mechanical structures. Put a network address in each one and they can be coordinated. The advantage of not reproducing is that they couldn't mutate if they had no reproduction mechanism at all. Can only come from the factory. Of course they could still be susceptible to viruses."
I've done a little googling since, and mule cells are actually a thing. In organisms they are very common. Neurons are an example. Parts of the immune system. There's also a thing in bacteria where cells divide, creating two daughter cells, one that can reproduce and one that can't. The one that can't makes a support structure around the one that can and then dies. This is how sporulation works.
None of this is deep, dark secret stuff. Some clumsy Wikipedia research got me this deep. If that's dangerous we are in deep sh*t.
(I'm not a biologist, I'm an animator who makes visualizations for university courses.)
I'll be impressed when they can create an entire cell from scratch and it will start to divide. They can create all the needed precursors, bypassing millions of years of random permutation. Because until you have an entire working cell with replication, you have no retained benefit.
Definitely. An implication of several strands of idealism is that we will be able to create artificial life (with consciousness)... it will just look like biology.
From cells dividing to human generation there is a single step.
Similarly a program that runs on a computer, where its only interactions are strings of numbers is the same as an entity having to interact with the world.
Interesting, we should be able to have LLMs generate full genetic code or Inpaint into existing code that can be installed into a cell as DNA and have it divide out into any custom creature.
We could launch these custom bacteria in stasis to planets around the galaxy and seed life everywhere.
> '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, as he disolves to red gray goo on live TV.
“This was where the field had been stuck for some time. Researchers before Adamala had figured out different ways to feed and grow synthetic cells and to replicate their DNA. But cell division is a different beast. A typical cell reorganizes its cytoskeleton — a network of protein fibers that provide structural support — to halve its DNA and split. Synthetic biologists could not figure out how to get their cells to undergo this complex process.
So Adamala decided to ditch the cytoskeleton. One day, while tearing through the literature, she came across an interesting mechanism in a paper (opens a new tab). By attaching protein tags to a cell membrane, the synthetic biologist Reinhard Lipowsky (opens a new tab) at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces attracted other proteins to crowd around and physically bend the membrane, forcing the cell to divide. Following this approach, Adamala tweaked a cell-membrane protein and tested it in her protocells. After several tries, it worked.“
This is the novel bit.
without criticising the work (its very cool and a very important first step) they haven't figured out division yet, which is kind of important.
Lots of missing steps before it is "created life". Which the researchers admit in the very start.
The interesting bit is that they didn't solve division by rebuilding the whole cytoskeleton, they sort of sidestepped it
(opens a new tab)
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.
More likely stuff that gets picked up when you copy and paste. I’ve seen that happen in the Google Chat electron app.
Maybe an accessibility feature for TTS or blind users?
that's exactly it, not AI at all. If you inspect any link in the article it shows it as screen-reader-text
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 assess it. She says her group will submit it to a new journal soon. “It’s an unusual way of doing things,” says Kerstin Göpfrich, a synthetic biologist at Heidelberg University.
https://www.science.org/content/article/lab-created-spudcell...
I thought the NY Times article was pretty good, they had some nice illustrations.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/07/01/science/spudc...
That is way more comprehensible for me at least.
Crazy that a Cell reviewer would claim synthetic biology is not biology
My paper demonstrating a side channel attack on RSA via hyperthreading was rejected from the crypto preprint archive on the basis that it was "not cryptography".
(Reviewers at J.Crypto subsequently sat on it for a year and then suggested I submit it to a journal on CPU microarchitecture instead.)
Novel research is uniquely susceptible to "cool but it's not part of our field", because that critique is entirely correct until the research gets published!
our paper to a database venue about bringing GPU support to Presto was rejected. one of the reviewers wrote, and I quote verbatim: "the topic of the paper is too practical". I just couldn't help but laughed at it.
Too practical haha Maybe they just wanted hype?
Or perhaps they wanted something theoritical that advances the state of the art in database design and architecture (which is the whole purpose of academic reasearch/conference/etc) - not merely some report describing doing something that's already been done for a different DB.
that's a very condescending view from you, to be honest.
Condescending? That's the mission of a scientific journal / conference / etc. Doesn't mean practical development work is "less worthy", but it's not a fit for them.
I disagree. I think it's very important to see how can those papers be turned into real things. Rejecting something for too practical is a joke, and if I ever find out who gave us that review, I'll have a talk with them.
Looking over Journal of Cryptology, they appear to be a theory journal. So an attack on an implementation, based on hardware probably doesn't interest them as much.
They publish lots of papers about side channel attacks, including very hardware based ones like power consumption analysis.
It just happened that "leak information into microarchitectural state and then retrieve it" didn't exist as a subfield until my work (and the OST work a few weeks behind mine).
> a forum for publication of original results in all areas of modern information security [1]
Seems like info sec to me.
[1] https://www.iacr.org/jofc/
I'm not familiar with your work, but a more arch venue does sound like more appropriate to me as someone from arch?
Frankly, there's no way any arch venue at the time would have done anything beyond rejecting it with "caches make RSA fast, what's the problem?"
Security wasn't something CPU designers paid much attention to, and cryptography wasn't something they were even particularly aware of. Even seven years ago, when an Intel VP was giving a talk at re:Invent about "processor technologies for improving security in virtual machines", my question to him about cache collision side channel attacks was met with "what's a side channel attack?"
Submit it as a CVE.
This was CVE-2005-0109.
A lower key Putnam moment
It's because really what they are doing is using chemistry to split a cell. Adamala is a chemist.
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.
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.
That's fair, but rejecting a paper for that reason seems excessive to me. Even if the reviewer may think that synthetic biology is not biology, they would know that plenty of synthetic biology papers have been published in Cell.
> for people to hold different definitions of words [...] is the single biggest reason for all arguments in recent human history.
IMO this extremely, extraordinarily true. And in my experience, it's somehow even more true for disagreements among scientists. Even though every scientific field is, in some sense, about defining a shared set of extremely precise jargon. (I recall two very well-respected scientists screaming at each other about the definition of "acidity" for instance)
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 differing opinions on what the word means how else can we reconcile or discuss the topic constructively?
The last time this happened I think the crux of the debate was the meaning of "unconstrained capitalism". Pretty sure the other person and I agreed on everything (values wise) except the precise meaning of that term, and the misunderstanding led them to accuse me of being unsavory.
These exchanges tend to discourage me from engaging in HN for a while.
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?
Well of course, it doesn't have a soul. /s
Yeah, I have a hard time reconciling this especially since biology and biologic research often involves things like enzymes which both aren't alive and are synthetically created.
I'm certain cell magazine has published articles on novel enzyme discovery.
Cause of all the theists at cell
Exoplanets also aren't planets. Some things just seem to have definitions with a history that get applied to new discoveries that don't fall within the definition. Distinguishing random rocks in space from planets was done by requiring planets to orbit around the sun, and so planets elsewhere cannot be called planets no matter that it's 1:1 the same thing. Biology probably has a similar history of trying to draw a line somewhere between what was created and what evolved to be part of the 'natural' world
Exoplanets are planets. Also, for clarification, biology is not defined as “the study of things produced exclusively by natural evolution.” Synthetic biology works with biological components and living systems (DNA, proteins, regulatory networks, cells and organisms). It differs from much traditional biology mainly in its constructive, engineering-oriented approach. Synthetic systems are often built precisely to test hypotheses about how natural biological systems function. Claiming it is not biology is wrong IMO.
For anyone else that might be curios, the definition of a planet you will often see quoted online applies to bodies in our Solar System. It comes from the International Astronomical Union in 2006. This is the famous definition that dropped Pluto as a planet. While the criteria are widely quoted, that actual resolution isn't. The resolution:
The IAU...resolves that planets and other bodies, except satellites, in the Solar System be defined into three distinct categories in the following way:
(1) A planet [1] is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit.
(2) A "dwarf planet" is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape [2], (c) has not cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit, and (d) is not a satellite.
(3) All other objects [3], except satellites, orbiting the Sun shall be referred to collectively as "Small Solar System Bodies".
The definition here only applies to bodies in the Solar System.
Still a bad definition IMO. According to the definition if a catastrophic event were to occur that cluttered the neighborhood of a planet it would cease to be a planet until it was cleaned up. The definition of a planet should be based in the physical attributes of the celestial body itself, not in its role or relationship with other bodies. I'm a bit of an extremist on this front. Even our Moon would be a planet in my opinion. Seems silly when you think about our barren moon but there are for sure habitable moons out there. I can't imagine asking an alien "What planet are you from?" and them responding "erm, actually we are from a moon/planetary satellite".
> Captain's Log, Stardate 1513.1. Our position, orbiting planet M-113. On board the Enterprise, Mr. Spock, temporarily in command.
<<insert nerd screeching about the word planet>>
Eh, that doesn't make sense.
What's a meteor?
The streak of light generated by a small astronomical body as it moves through the atmosphere of earth (or another astronomical body).
Meteoroid then.
Asteroids and meteoroids are the same, except for where they are positions.
Mothers and women are the same, except for their relationships to others.
And notice how we have those two different words - mother and woman? You can have words that describe relationships, in fact that is really good! You can even compound words or create whole new ones to encompass multiple types of attributes! What we should avoid is taking widely used words and changing the definition to add a criterion that is of a whole other type of attribute.
Your mother and woman example is perfect! It would not be appropriate to most people to change the definition of woman to a female that had or has an offspring. You are taking a definition that describes an attribute of the subject (gender) and throwing in criteria that is based on a relationship. That makes no sense!
If it is important for you to make a distinction on whether an astronomical body has cleared its neighborhood then you can create a new word or compound word.
Right? It's biology when you study enzymes in vitro, but as soon as you put a membrane around them then it's ... something else?
Bizarre argument.
> Exoplanets also aren't planets.
That is flatly wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exoplanet
"An exoplanet or extrasolar planet is a planet outside the Solar System."
The GP post's point was that, logical as this would be, the IAU definition explicitly states that planets are "in the Solar System". So no, exoplanets are exoplanets, not planets. And Pluto isn't an example of either.
No, The IAU definition does not say that. You and others are confusing the definition of a planet with its application to planets in the solar system (and thus to Pluto) -- IAU Resolution 5A: Definition of a Planet in the Solar System.
The IAU of course does not assert that only planets in the solar system are planets ... that would be ridiculous, and the interpretation of the IAU's stance as being so ridiculous is ridiculous and then some.
https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/planets/what-is-a-plan...
"The definition of a planet adopted by the IAU says a planet must do three things:
It must orbit a star (in our cosmic neighborhood, the Sun).
It must be big enough to have enough gravity to force it into a spherical shape.
It must be big enough that its gravity has cleared away any other objects of a similar size near its orbit around the Sun."
https://www.iau.org/IAU/Science/What-we-do/Pluto-and-the-Dev...
"More generally, a planet:
a. orbits its host star, just as the Earth and Jupiter orbit the Sun,
b. is large enough to be mostly round, and
c. must have an important influence on the orbital stability of the other objects in its neighbourhood."
> 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 planets, it just never came up until now".
The reviewer of this paper is saying that by biology they always meant naturally evolved cellular biology, not synthetic biology - there's just never been an example of the latter before.
I think the take is wrong, the receiving journals should be excited to expand their scope rather than frustratedly redefine their scope more narrowly, but definitions and categorization are hard.
> What they meant when they said "planets"
Who is "they", and how do you know what they meant?
The relevant fact is that the claim "Exoplanets also aren't planets" is simply wrong -- exoplanets are by definition planets outside the solar system. It's like claiming that a brown furple isn't a furple -- the claim is wrong, regardless of what one thinks a furple is.
> The reviewer of this paper is saying that by biology they always meant naturally evolved cellular biology, not synthetic biology - there's just never been an example of the latter before.
They aren't saying that, and that isn't true.
> exoplanets are by definition planets outside the solar system. It's like claiming that a brown furple isn't a furple -- the claim is wrong, regardless of what one thinks a furple is.
If only language was so logical.
While I happen to agree that exoplanets are planets, as with my point in the other comment, I aver the stronger claim ("regardless") does not follow in this context.
Stonehenge, after which the concept of a henge is named, does not meet the current archeological definition of a henge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henge
Jerusalem artichokes are neither artichokes nor from Jerusalem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerusalem_artichoke
Guinea pigs are not pigs and are not from Guinea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guinea_pig
The "mincemeat" in a mince pie is, these days, usually vegetarian: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincemeat
Chinese checkers is German and plays nothing like checkers. Peanuts are not nuts, strawberries are not berries, hamburgers do not generally contain ham, a killer whale is actually a dolphin, etc.
I don't need an off topic point-missing lecture on how language works that could have and might as well have been written by a clanker. The fact remains that exoplanets are by definition a type of planet, regardless of whether Jerusalem artichokes are a type of artichoke -- proper names as adjectives work differently, and the "mincemeat" example is simply bad faith ... actually, the whole pushback here is bad faith argumentation.
And "gas giants are failed stars and shouldn't count as planets" is completely irrelevant -- at best it's a fallacy of denial of the antecedent.
I won't respond further.
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.
Actually, that is the IAU stance. And their definition for exoplanet includes small, non-rounded objects orbiting stars which would be asteroids (or comets or whatever) if they happened to be around the Sun.
All that debacle around dwarf planets to prepare for future observations, and yet the distinction ceases to apply the moment you go outside the Oort cloud...
But really, that's just the naming systems being bad, obviously common people don't think asteroids around other stars are "exoplanets" or should be called that way
This is quite wrong.
https://www.iau.org/IAU/Science/What-we-do/Pluto-and-the-Dev...
"More generally, a planet:
a. orbits its host star, just as the Earth and Jupiter orbit the Sun,
b. is large enough to be mostly round, and
c. must have an important influence on the orbital stability of the other objects in its neighbourhood."
Exoplanets are planets by that definition where the host star is not our Sun:
"Researchers have found hundreds of extrasolar planets, or exoplanets, that reside outside our solar system. "
I'm not talking about edge cases like asteroids or planetoids or dwarf planets. I'm talking about actual planets. Like a gas giant orbiting a star. It's obviously a planet even if it's not orbiting Sol.
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 ~
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.
> “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.
> 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.
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".
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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
Understanding how a bunch of baroque proteins interact is the definition of stamp collecting. As a meat bag made up of such machines
I appreciate it for what it is. As a intelligence capable of abstraction I don't measure our progress in science by the number of stamps in our collection.
There are no big ideas, biology included, because peer review is only there for small ideas.
So you think biology is just proteomics and use meme expressions like 'meat bag', got it. Not updating my prior on you being unserious
I'm a coauthor on a peer reviewed biology paper with 5,000 citation.
"Co-author" lol we both know what that means. Still, if that's true that makes it even sadder. Hope you mature and broaden your horizons at some point instead of engaging in undergrad-style petty field rivalries
Science hasn't worked since 1986? HN has some of the wildest claims / exaggerations.
What does this mean “it’s the left that’s the problem”? The right’s solution to academic reform is literal pseudoscience. And I don’t mean this as whataboutism—I’m responding to the implication that some political faction other than the left has the right answer, and I don’t know who that would be.
> Anyone pointing out the obvious - that peer review is broken and science hasn't worked in 40 years - is at best a flat Earther.
Yes, if someone claims that science hasn't worked (what does it even mean?) for 40 years then he's not that far from being flat Eather. It's hard to expect other side to be reasonable while making such absurd claims.
What field are you in that you'd actually wait two years, rather than retract your submission and go somewhere else?
Not in academia, but aware of the process, I was wondering just the same.
I have always found this article on the matter quite revealing: https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-...
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.
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.
There are other quotes that do think it’s significant. Why do you think the more critical scientists are more correct?
> John Glass, a synthetic biologist at the J. Craig Venter Institute in La Jolla, Calif., who was not involved in the study. “It is dazzling that she has put these things all together,” he said.
> “We’re going to remember this moment,” said Roseanna Zia, a computational biologist at the University of Missouri who was not involved in the project.
Maybe you prefer scientists who put their money where their mouth is (even if that’s a conflict of interest)
> When Dr. Adamala showed SpudCell to Dr. Endy… (a synthetic biologist at Stanford University) … last year, he was so awestruck that he decided to help her found Biotic, the nonprofit organization intended to create a community of SpudCell researchers. “I’m pouring my life’s work into this,” Dr. Endy said.
> Why do you think the more critical scientists are more correct?
I am not qualified to make a judgement here, the point is following the process is better than jumping the gun on principle.
It literally doesn’t matter if it’s eventually considered groundbreaking research or not, jumping the gun is a bad idea.
> I am not qualified to make a judgement here, the point is following the process is better than jumping the gun on principle.
Why? The process is quite obviously net negative; we'd get better results with no process at all.
> 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.
You’re mistaken in thinking it’s paid for by the government, though yes many governments are collectively a significant funding source they are far from the only funding source here.
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.
>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
Who do you believe should be the gatekeeper here? Why can’t the scientist and the news outlets be trusted to make the decision about whether to publish or not themselves? Why can’t the general public be trusted to evaluate the quality of the news outlets they read?
> Why can’t the scientist and the news outlets be trusted to make the decision about whether to publish or not themselves? Why can’t the general public be trusted to evaluate the quality of the news outlets they read?
Because the scientists involved and reporters manifestly do a bad job about picking what is or isn’t groundbreaking and more importantly have various incentives to hype things up.
CERN scientists with the whole FTL neutrino particle were actively skeptical of the results and still held a press conference on the topic. As to reporters, you’re welcome to go through the published stories about the topic and notice how rarely getting the distance wrong was brought up even when the scientists involved where skeptical. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_OPERA_faster-than-light_n...
The general public is utterly incompetent at judging science. Homeopathy is the tip of the iceberg of ignorance.
You didn’t answer the actually interesting question I posed, who should be the gatekeeper instead?
Yes, yes, journalists and scientists have bad incentives and the general public is dumb. You’re not exactly setting the world on fire with that observation. The problem is that there is no better alternative. Any conceivable gatekeeper to scientific knowledge will be no smarter than the research scientists producing the results and will certainly have problematic incentives of their own. And a gatekeeper will also lack the local knowledge that might determine whether the information might helpful or harmful to the potential reader.
Programming reinvented a similar system of peer review before commits. It’s not that the reviewer is more knowledgeable about the bits of the system being changed that makes this work it’s that they have enough expertise to understand what’s involved and a new set of eyes on the problem.
In science having multiple journals acts as a safety valve here, but the underlying principle is very similar. As much as some people bad mouth it, peer review is a very low hurdle before publication that still catches a great number of mistakes.
Why would it be an overreaction?
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> 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.
Journalists are meant to report on the news. This sounds like an interesting piece of science/news to me.
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...
There is a similar story with the discovery of buckey-balls. A researcher at University of Houston had data that demonstrated buckey-balls were created, but he didn't fully understand what he was looking at. Then a researcher at Rice saw the data and recognized c-60 was being created, so he bought the data and the process and then "invented" carbon balls
I'm not suggesting you tell no-one about your ideas, but if you can't convince people who know the field, turning to laypeople instead is the hallmark of a crank.
Extraornary claims should require extraornary proof, not a credulous audience.
Seeing as we are talking about it now, it seems like they were right that it is interesting to the public.
I am not sure why you think social media attention needs to be gate kept.
"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.
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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 nearly identical experiments and gets slightly better results. They push onto a pre-pub server and immediately get it into a tier-1 venue. They are now state of the art. You are now merely the person reproducing original work.
TL;DR politics breaks everything.
My wife has had numerous papers rejected because the reviewer belonged to a competing lab. Took a few tries and a request to exclude a certain reviewer and hey presto! published!
Were these open reviews? Many times they are blinded, so unless they revealed their identity, you would not know.
When the number of people is small enough, it's not too hard to figure out the identity of supposedly anonymous people.
I've done that once in an anonymous chat group with about 35 people in it.
That is despicable behavior from a professional. How common is this in academia?
As common as pedophilia in priests: IOW, despite anyone's "feel" or "gut impression", probably the exact same distribution as in the general population.
Nothing about belief in the RC church nor education of the priests filters for pedophilia, despite lots of loose opinions. Priests, plumbers, and people who live in Scarsdale are all generally equally likely to be pedophiles. (There are meaningful filters, like man versus woman.)
Nothing about pursuing an academic career selects for or filters against dishonesty. I've seen astounding dishonesty in published papers; I've seen admirable examples of morality as well.
Hard to say but my impression is that most academics are honest and would try not to do this, but also there are rivalries between labs and that tends to encourage "everything they do is bad and we're great" mentalities so it's definitely not surprising.
Too common, unfortunately. Publishing and getting public credit like this are considered high stakes (which justify, or at least make some sense of occurring despicableness). There is much too much infighting over nothing (compared to the money in the corporate world).
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.
Because it does, the review process is now no longer double blind. And I disagree, I think there is no obvious solution - though I would venture to guess that publishing the reviewer's names alongside their reviews upon rejection would be a better step towards a healthy discourse.
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.
> 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
The usual way of doing things is completely broken system.
Obligatory reference to Kuhn. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift
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 relic.
For productive matters, Biotec preferes to rely on its biomachines. Imagine drones giving birth to offspring when traffic is at a peak. It takes more energy, sure. But no factory, nor workers are needed.
If left alone, machines would multiply out of control, instead of rotting to waste like in the olden days.
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 notes that this event actually occurred ~3.5 billion years ago, and suggests that the current hive-mind should buy a subscription.
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...
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.
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.
Humans have the power to self reproduce though. I don’t believe anything short of an engineered disease could wipe out all of humanity at this point and it has to happen soon before we figure out how to fix all of our problems using genetic engineering.
To note, we are already solving our problems through genetic engineering... Only one generation at a time.
A high enough wet bulb temperature can wipe out all of humanity.
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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.
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 life for industrial purposes FASTER because biocontrol is easier (they got nothing to eat) and lab escape is far less likely
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
Thanks for the correction. What about the peptide bound? Can normal bacteria break mirror-proteins?
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?
AFAIK she was saying we were years not decades away which is what made her nervous. We were very close and the risks hadn't been fully explored.
If anyone is interested in the actual manuscript, here it is: https://www.biotic.org/research/spudcell/spudcell-manuscript...
The people behind it:
https://biotic.org/
> Biotic is a public-benefit nonprofit research organization developing chemically and functionally defined synthetic cells. Biotic's mission is to responsibly enable and steward foundational advances in bioengineering. Our goal is to ensure that all people and the planet benefit from world‑leading biotechnologies soon enough to matter. We conduct and support public‑benefit research ranging from foundational science to how people interact with biotechnology.
It looks like this particular research is conducted at the University of Minnesota
Everything they are doing is dual use. Thus I don't feel the benefit.
Layman, so bear with me. I'm wondering where they got the amino acids and proteins from? I was under the impressino that cells needed them to be "homochiral" to function, and the artificial 'built from scratch' amino acids are 50:50 of each chirality. In my reading of the NYTimes simplification of this story they mention that the genes were "borrowed from a virus and the ubiquitous microbe Escherichia coli". Mainly just curious how far they managed to get to the 'from scratch' goal. Or is what they've done a bit more of an assembly of bits and pieces? Cheers all.
I;m one of the co-founders, AMA :)
Hi, thanks, and very cool work (assuming it eventually holds up in peer review)!
A few things that confused me while trying to read the paper:
- There's two different methods of cell division mentioned -- mechanical extrusion and the autonomous, protein-driven division. Most of the results (e.g. the five generations) focus on the mechanically driven one, while the autonomous one is more "lifelike". Does the autonomous division have a higher failure rate, or can you get the same results with it as well?
- It's mentioned that the bottleneck for survival of many generations is ribozomes degrading, but also that ribozomes are supplied from the outside. Do the degraded ribozomes actively harm the cell? Or is there some other reason why they cannot be replenished?
- You say that after 5 generations, only 30% of the cells have the correct genome, and it's presented like a problem -- but 30% of 2^5 is more than 10, so this sounds like more than enough for continued survival. Is there something missing in this train of thought? Perhaps other failures that can kill the cell?
And some questions about the implications:
- Do you think that the genome you use is already close to minimal? AFAIK a lot of the minimal organisms found in the wild are parasites of some sort, getting most of their complex molecules from the outside, which is a similar spirit to this (a rich medium and the cell "just" self-duplicating). If the multiple plasmids are causing trouble (per the previous point), would it make sense to try and get rid of some of them?
- Are those minimal genes somehow interpretable -- as in "you need functions X, Y, and Z and cannot avoid them by using a better medium"?
- Do you think this is a plausible stage of very early life?
The current model, of a cell that cannot live on its own and cannot evolve (being too far from "edge of chaos") is what will be most useful for bio-engineering. Yes, we need the mechanism for creating cells, and the newfound division for a minimum viable cell is paramount. But, we also need for ways to control its reproduction, be it as to die out on its own after few generations due to degraded protein build-up, or (in the best case scenario) due to some other built in mechanism. Otherwise, expect (at least) some amount of scaremongering, about playing fast and loose with things that may get out of hand. The best thing is to have this kind of cell template that could somehow be augmented with whatever additional plug-in functionality (useful for us, case by case) and then get it produced in the needed quantities and not more. The research direction that makes sense is for ways to add such "mission specific" functions to this synthetic cell and ways to create the first generation as efficiently as possible, at large scale. That's it.
If you get it to divide by itself, and it gets leaked, can it exist as a new species indefinitely?
Something like, all forms of life share a common ancestor.. until now
Is it edible? If not, why not?
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: division is very much a core goal of the synthetic cell field, and getting a built-from-defined-parts system to grow and divide reliably on its own is one of the big open problems ahead of us. What SpudCell demonstrates is assembling something cell-like from well-defined components. Where this does connect to the "programmable matter" dream is that if you can engineer a cell from the ground up, you can in principle program what it makes and does, using biology's own manufacturing stack rather than trying to invent a mechanical one from scratch. That's a slower and messier path than the sci-fi version, but it's the one that actually runs on physics we think we understand.. hope it makes sense!
> The self-replication and division you're picturing comes from that biological machinery copying and dividing
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.
NYT piece with visualizations:
This Cell Feeds, Grows and Reproduces. and It's Manmade
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/07/01/science/spudc... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48747038)
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 sister chromatids apart from each other. After the chromosomes separate, other cytoskeletal filaments (actin and myosin) form a contractile ring, which tightens to create a cleavage furrow. The membrane pinches inward until the cell splits in two.
Bacteria work slightly differently, since they don't have a eukaryotic cytoskeleton, but they do have cytoskeletal-like proteins (FtsZ), since they divide by building the cell wall inward (I am not an expert on bacteria lol).
SpudCell doesn't have a cytoskeleton, so instead it relies on a physical membrane-rupture strategy. It makes membrane proteins from its own DNA (a-hemolysin), which inserts into the membrane. They help fuse with feeder liposomes for growth. For division, these proteins crowd on the membrane surface, creating mechanical stress which leads to membrane instability, which then splits on its own.
The complexity is certainly awesome, however there are all kinds of "free lunches" that we can take advantage of here, I'm paraphrasing (and glazing) Mike Levin here - when you work with biological systems, you are handling an agential material that naturally expresses itself.
I suspect that, once scientists lean more into the right kind of communication with these systems that many substantial leaps forward will be made. I am very excited about it too, mostly because I think it has the potential to positively impact how we see ourselves (humans) in the natural world.
And the synthetic cell doesn't need to do anything about separating genetic material between daughter cells because it's just free-floating DNA that is likely to be in both parts. Right?
More like, the DNA is tied to the membrane, so splitting the membrane splits the DNA too.
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.
Terrible, the cytoskeleton is the best bit of the cell!
(not just grumpy because that's what I did my PhD research on)
Randall - new XKCD idea just dropped
Also discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48747038
This is so cool! I had once gone in the rabbit-hole of finding artificial life and there were experiments which did multiple phases but none which did the whole thing and I was left wondering why. I am a bit happy to see that someone was working on it (and succeeded!)
There is another submission on Hackernews which talks about: The first early human eggs from stem cells[0] which is an interesting discussion to read through on hackernews as well.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48742483
If you read a bit you learn that it's not a cell. Bad title imo.
"Not alive, but doing a suspicious number of alive-looking things" is a pretty good summary of why this is cool
Layman question. How can they determine that the cell divided in a reproducing/growing fashion rather than due to mechanical or other external means because of the methodology they used to trigger the act of breaking up? Or does it not matter in living cells either?
Waiting for lab-grown meat. Hope it comes closer to fruition before my kidneys give out.
There are multiple FDA-approved lab-grown meats on the market. You can literally go to a handful of restaurants and order lab-grown meat today. The production process is just expensive and it's getting scaled out.
Yes. It's still quite a distance away from a feel and taste of meat. At least the affordable ones.
Lab-grown meat seems completely unrelated to synthetic biology. For lab grown meat the problem to my knowledge is that it is very expensive to grow vertebrate cells in the absence of an immune system because every contamination kills the batch.
let me put it this way .. it will come before the wallet gives out! (for masses)
I wonder if these principles could be applied to non-organic components. I imagine a completely synthetic robo-cell would raise interesting questions.
Also, go MN!
It appears the scientists or someone close to them have created a wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpudCell
I don't think I've ever seen researchers do PR like this directly. Interesting approach, will it become the norm?
So what is being described here? Scratch-built self-replicating nano-machines inspired by biology? That itself seems significant.
The aliens that seeded life on Earth are seeing us making baby steps. Expect a visit soon!
> aliens that seeded life on Earth are seeing us making baby steps
Or like a grad student didn’t dispose of their work properly and are desperately trying to distract from their scandal.
I vastly prefer the explanation like of Roadside Picnic. They didn't try to create us, they don't care that we're here, and, ultimately, we will never be able to know them in any meaningful sense. ;)
https://shkrobius.livejournal.com/401292.html offers a fascinating narrative rooted in cell biology
I never thought of it this way... who knows, could be a possibility! Oh, this is creepy...
There is a whole movie about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1azwUwKrPo
It's rare to see posts like this with such pure, crystalized ideology.
Just wait 'til he finds out the alien was Trelane and he just wanted more soldiers for his play army.
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.
I love how this article reads similarly to articles about recent advances in the Conway's Game of Life community.
From my point of view: a team combined all the tricks in the community into one machine and we finally created a new life form to play with!
With these kind of 'demonstrations', the key question is what have we learnt as a result?
Not sure what that is in this case.
This is great, I assumed we were getting close (and not quite there), so it's great to see the progress. The path from here to building a single-celled organism out of nonlive materials looks very straight.
I wouldn’t really consider this creating life, but this is the first step into something extremely cool for sure. Love topics like this
Scientists seem really busy these days creating synthetic life: advances in AI, human eggs from stem cells and now this - synthetic cells. I somehow feel they are inspired by the Alien movies.
They are inspired by transhumanist agenda and corresponding VC backing.
I look forward to never hearing about this ever again.
> Or, as Adamala put it: “What else can biology do?”
Oh I dunno, maybe create synthetic organisms capable of rapidly destroying all life?
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 is a common phrase and has been for a very long time though has increased over the last 6 years or so.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=is+doing+a+lot...
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.
"doing a lot of work" and "doing a lot of the heavy-lifting" are and have been somewhat common on reddit, etc. I guess it's a great source for LLMs for weighting, because the weighting is largely done for you via upvotes. Something search engines love as well.
The weighting-by-upvotes is why there was a short period when Google's AI search results (I'm not 100% clear on whether that was Gemini, or a different model) would tell you to use white glue to keep the cheese from falling off your pizza. Because that was shortly after they had bought Reddit's data set, and they hadn't yet gone in and filtered out "upvoted because it's useful info" from "upvoted because it's hilarious". And the Reddit post recommending white glue to keep the cheese from falling off your pizza had gotten thousands of "man, that's hilarious, I love it" upvotes.
It's an ancient phrase.
This is really cool. But I dislike the dialog where because step 1 happened people talk like steps 2-100 are not inevitable.
> “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 imagine?
Yes, mechanically constructing life would be absolutely stupendous for science. The real tragedy of modern sci-fi is that everyone read the books and decided it was reality.
“Penicillin?! A poison from fungus that kills living cells?! Haven’t you played the sci fi game The Last of Us?”
Stories are stories, man. Story-logic is biased towards interesting tales. And “discovery from the natural world turned to human aims with great results” is uninteresting because we do amazing things these days.
> Stories are stories, man. Story-logic is biased towards interesting tales.
Also known as the fallacy of “generalizing from fictional evidence”.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rHBdcHGLJ7KvLJQPk/the-logica...
Hilarious. Everything that I can think of has been already Yuddocumented. I am but a minor replicant LLM of the man. https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Story-Logic_Bias
I don't spend any time on LW but perhaps that is because I'll have to face that all my ideas have already been explored more eloquently by him and the communities he's part of.
He is prolific!
Thank you for sharing your site as well :)
I think the issue is that those stories are rooted very much in the failures of human systems that we see every day. They are us imagining what could go wrong based on what has gone wrong and is going wrong.
It would be a lot easier to set those warnings aside if we didn't have so many examples of the very things they warn about happening in real life.
We currently have a system where private individuals can fund private science and then deploy the results globally to their own profit with very few mechanisms for enforcing restraint and caution. And we've seen this backfire with horrific consequences over and over again.
Lead in the gasoline. Microplastics in the water. Pesticides widely applied to the biosphere. In my area PCBs are a massive risk due to past soil contamination. In other areas fracking biproducts make the water undrinkable.
Hell the AI rush in the face of climate change. We literally have heatwaves killing massive numbers of people while a tiny handful of investors and the companies they control are drastically increasing our carbon emissions in the race for AI.
It's easy to imagine all the ways in which synthetic life could go horribly wrong, even with out those sci-fi stories, especially since all but the youngest of us have been through a brutal pandemic in living memory.
It's very, very hard to imagine our current system showing proper restraint with this technology.
It's regretable you got modded down.
Ever since the industrial revolution, humanity has stumbled from one environmental disaster to the other.
Heavy metals, CFCs, acid rain, radioactive elements that don't occur naturally, microplastics, PFAS, large scale oil spills, greenhouse gasses, deforestation, over-fishing, species extinction, the list goes on & on.
And in each case, early warnings are ignored & the harmful activity is only curbed many decades after deployment at scale, when environmental harm becomes too serious to ignore.
Imho AI is no exception to this rule. Its energy usage alone adds to CO2 emissions at a time those should be reduced. Higher efficiency says anyone? No! Higher productivity. Read: same # of humans can consume even bigger amount of resources per time unit.
Yeah I can envision the wonders AGI/ASI could bring to humanity. But as deployed right now, it mostly helps to worsen a number of problems in human society (CO2 emissions, wealth inequality, concentration of economic/political power, to name a few).
Synthetic life? Absolutely, would be a fantastic scientific milestone. But could also turn into yet another eco disaster.
It's important to emphasize that cars are the leading source of carbon emissions. Anyone fighting against AI on the basis of climate change should be fighting for safe and reliable alternatives to driving everywhere.
This is "whatabboutism" which is a logical fallacy.
Someone doesn't have to talk about the climate impacts of cars every time they talk about the climate impacts of AI. Both have climate impacts, independently of each other, and we should be dealing with the climate impacts of both simultaneously.
Regardless, don't assume the person you are talking to isn't consistent. Peruse my personal blog and you will see that I, in fact, ran a whole city council campaign on a platform of "to fight climate change we should not be driving".
> This is "whatabboutism" which is a logical fallacy.
No it isn't. You don't optimize a piece of software by profiling it and rendering a flame graph, and then ignoring the sections of code that the most time is being spent in. You work on optimizing the paths where the most time is being spent, because that is where your effort has the most room for impact. If we are trying to optimize carbon emissions instead of time, we look at the biggest sources of emissions first, because that's where our effort has the most room for impact.
> Someone doesn't have to talk about the climate impacts of cars every time they talk about the climate impacts of AI.
I never said they did. I said they should be fighting both if they actually care about the issue.
> Peruse my personal blog and you will see that I, in fact, ran a whole city council campaign on a platform of "to fight climate change we should not be driving".
Excellent, you are fighting both because you care about the issue. Thank you for your service.
Someone doesn't have to talk about the climate impacts of cars every time they talk about the climate impacts of AI.
Actually they do, because the best way to get cars off the road is to replace many if not most of their occupants with AI.
Private ownership of cars is not the problem. The assumption that people have to drive all over the place to get stuff done is the problem. Let's work on that.
> the best way to get cars off the road is to replace many if not most of their occupants with AI.
I'm so confused by this. Instead of one person driving a car to the store and parking, now the car is driving itself to the store with one person in it, dropping them off, and then either parking, or driving itself around more, back to the house or to a distant parking facility. In crowded cities, the car is just going to drive around the block empty for an hour instead of paying $12 for parking. Single-occupancy vehicles are a big problem now; I don't understand how introducing a bunch of zero-occupancy vehicles are an improvement on that? It seems very obvious to me self-driving cars are going to significantly increase the total number of miles driven every day in the world.
I didn't say anything about self-driving cars. You still need to go to the store, if you don't get your stuff delivered by someone who is (hopefully) delivering to more than one house.
You don't need to go to the office. Neither does your car.
And the most promising of those alternatives is, ironically enough, AI itself. Fighting data centers is literally like fighting nuclear power. If you just want more carbon emissions, then by all means, proceed.
Of course most people who commute to work don't need to be doing that now, but that's the other big elephant in the room with AI. We don't use the intelligence we already have, so what makes us think the emergence of ASI/AGI will change anything?
The most promising alternative is making it legal to build housing near where people want to be (commercial districts) and make it legal to build places people want to be near where they live (build cafes, shops, etc in suburbia). Any help that AI could have on the situation would just as easily be applied to working from home without AI.
Should also be fighting for that.
That’s just wrong. Transportation is 24% of carbon emissions with 18% road transportation and about 10% of that from cars. Electricity and heat production is the largest source of carbon emissions.
It's not wrong in the US.
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/transportation-sector-emiss...
I'm also not breaking out personal SUVs and light trucks from "cars" because that'd be stupid.
> cars are the leading source of carbon emissions.
WTF? cars are less than 7% and even including trucks we are barely around 11%. when you look at greenhouse effect instead of "just carbon", the percentages are even tinier.
If you are looking for leading sources of climate change look at electricity/heat, industry and agriculture.
just because (bad) politicians are always talking about cars when talking about climate it doesn't mean the are actually a meaningful component. it is smoke and mirros…
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
transportation is NOT "passenger cars"
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_fermentation
It seems like this cell barely evolves, because the system they built for duplicating the DNA makes very few errors.
Natural life tends to evolve, which may have consequences for production.
For example, quorn production has to be restarted from a seed population after ~1000 hours because it tends to evolve colonial variants that break the product standards: https://www.davidmoore.org.uk/21st_century_guidebook_to_fung...
Very interesting! Thanks for sharing
It's desirable to have some kind of simple base to start from that is an easy-to-configure platform to deploy any kind of metabolic machinery.
Their "minimal" cell is not quite a minimum product because it depends on prebuilt ribosomes and can't reproduce on it's own. No danger of gray goo!
This is more like it
https://www.jcvi.org/research/first-minimal-synthetic-bacter...
but those guys could probably add components to their cell to make it truly self-supporting although in biology there is a big difference between "barely works" and "high performance"
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.
> That is the holy grail?
At one end we're creating artificial life, the other we are creating artificial intelligence.
We're coming at everything we as the human race have known for millennia from both ends, simultaneously. We're recreating that, from scratch.
That is absolutely fucking wild.
Ironically this "holy" grail will end up being the thing that finally puts religious creation myths in their place (i.e. as bullshit) since we will be able to answer with 100% certainty that we are not alone or unique in the universe since we recreated life in the fucking petri dish so why not across the billions and trillions of other planets out there?
What a time to be alive.
> we will be able to answer with 100% certainty that we are not alone or unique in the universe since we recreated life in the fucking petri dish
I don't think we are alone, but this is not logically sound. The conditions in the petri dish might be easily so special that their natural prevalence is < 1 per universe.
The first time this happens in a petri dish will likely have to be under extremely controlled circumstances. But the process will be modified and toyed with once it exists and I think that this will eventually lead to whole spectrum of (quasi?)biological systems that together cover a broad range of environmental conditions.
> Ironically this "holy" grail will end up being the thing that finally puts religious creation myths in their place (i.e. as bullshit) since we will be able to answer with 100% certainty that we are not alone or unique in the universe since we recreated life in the fucking petri dish so why not across the billions and trillions of other planets out there?
How does it affect religious ideas per se? its something many religious people long to find https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026/06/disclosure-day-a...
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.
Who thought evolutionary theory would end religion? Sounds like wishful thinking from people who were hoping for an end to religion.
Mainstream Christianity was not biblical literalist anyway. Read what Augustine or Origen had to say about interpreting Genesis.
> Who thought evolutionary theory would end religion?
Some terribly ill-informed people have. Plus ca change. Sadly, the experience of "Christianity" of many Americans is either caricature or some kind of novel and vulgar fundamentalism they grew up around that sprouted on American soil in the last century or two. Add to that the black legends supplied by the Enlightenment and others and you have a perfect storm of malicious ignorance.
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".
> Science can't disprove religion.
That depends on which religion, doesn't it. The categorical claim doesn't make any sense, because the general notion of "religion" doesn't entail anything that is inherently at odds with science. And if there is a normative sense of what is or isn't religion, then this is even more true, because normativity means there is a correct religion or most correct religion, and you can't be correct without being true.
Some religious traditions, however, do make claims that are wide open to scientific discreditation (like the "Lamanite hypothesis" of Mormonism).
The big bang theory isn't even incompatible with the idea that 'God did it'; the idea was first proposed by a Catholic priest, as a matter of fact! I think the anti-science stance of evangelicals has eclipsed in the modern consciousness the fact that modern science owes much to the Catholic church.
> This startling idea first appeared in scientific form in 1931, in a paper by Georges Lemaître, a Belgian cosmologist and Catholic priest.
excerpt from https://www.amnh.org/learn-teach/curriculum-collections/cosm...
I think this is really the wrong framing. Science can't disprove religion. The question is whether it makes any sense to believe in the religion in the first place, given what observation and science say about the universe. Science can't prove that God didn't create the universe a nano-second ago in exactly the state to produce this temporal evolution, but no one believes that because its not explanatory and also fails a bunch of other, not-necessarily scientific, but rationally motivated epistemological tests.
The way I see this is that science cannot disprove any particular religion, but it can probably offer more compelling explanations for the state of the world than religion can offer. People haven't flocked away from religion because explanations for the state of the world aren't really what people want from religion. They want a sop for their anxieties. they want community, etc. I think believing in nonsense is a real shitty way to get these things, but I'm not most people.
Problem is Abrahamic religion believes God made humans from dirt.
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.
(Disclaimer: on religion I try to be respectful, as an agnostic atheist) I do think our ability to “build tools that create life” is incredible, but to me has a limited argumentative impact on what I guess you could call the “prime mover” question: _But how did everything start?_ Does that seem reasonable or am I downplaying the implications you mentioned?
Nah. The natural pivot is from “we have never observed abiogenesis” to “see? Life required a creator.”
You can’t win
Thomas Aquinas made the argument that all life comes from other life in the 13th Century. I wouldn't classify it as a modern pivot so much as one of the central philosophical arguments for the existence of a Creator.
Aye, but this will let us gradually work towards more and more basic cell forms, so that we can eventually figure out abiogenesis.
I might in some sense agree with you but check your wording: creationism... we recreated life... see where I'm going?
Not really. AI isn't intelligent by any stretch. To make that claims requires ignorance of what constitutes "intelligence", especially the most essential element of intelligence, viz., intensionality. LLMs or expert system or whatever absolutely lack intensionality by definition because computation is by definition a purely syntactic process.
> Ironically this "holy" grail will end up being the thing that finally puts religious creation myths in their place
I think you're way out of your depth here and making things up. The first tell is that you use "religion" as a blanket term as if all religious traditions make the same claims, which they absolutely do not. You can discredit, say, Mormonism much more easily than, say, Islam (though, ironically, there is a strange structural similarity between the two).
> we will be able to answer with 100% certainty that we are not alone or unique in the universe since we recreated life [..] so why not across the billions and trillions of other planets out there?
Who exactly claims that human beings or, generally, life on earth is the only life in the universe? None of the major religions do. I'm also going to assume that Christianity (or some caricature of it) is for you the paradigmatic reference point of what constitutes "religion", in which case there is nothing in Christian theology that excludes the possibility of life - even embodied intelligent life - elsewhere in the universe. (The latter is actually interesting from an ontological perspective. If the definition of "human" is "rational animal", then by definition, all rational animals are human. So, from an ontological perspective, even if an intelligent, phylogenetically distinct species were to be found on another planet, ontologically, they would also be human.)
> What a time to be alive.
May well turn into a time to better be dead.
Wait you think creating life disapproves creationism?
I’m no 7 day creationist but haha my guy…
That’s because we’re almost to the Technological Singularity
Kurzweil puts it between 2029-2032 and that seems right to me
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity
Yeah, imagine if one day it will become trivial to blow up the world. Enough people hate humanity that they would do it, by tomorrow if they could. Seems like out exponential growth in technology will eventually lead up to that. If not actual nuclear explosion, then biological weapons. Would we need to enslave humans not to do it. How would that work.
I agree with your conclusion. We start by enslaving certain classes of humans like Peter Thiel or Elon Musk. Anyone with more than $1B gets the collar. Populism is a helluva drug.
> That is the holy grail?
If you can disassemble and reassemble a thing, you can say you understand it. Not perfectly. But understand it. I’d imagine properly understanding rudimentary cellular biology will come with perks.
(Also, does the Holy Grail imply both a boon and a cost? Or is that just Indian Jones.)
To your aside: No, in this abstract sense Holy Grails are just a boon, a desirable piece of knowledge, achievement, that sort of thing.
While this is an impressive step forward, there remains an extremely long way, probably of several decades, until being able to design and synthesize a cell comparable in complexity with a bacterium.
The thing that they made is more alive than a crystal, which when placed in a suitable solution will grow and reproduce its own structure, but much less alive than even the simplest known living cells.
Its "life" is similar to that of a brain-dead human, whose body is not left to die by a bunch of machines that pump air into its lungs and nutrients through its blood vessels.
The techniques developed to make this pseudo-cell might evolve eventually into techniques able to make a true cell and it is likely that valuable information can be extracted from experiments with it, but it is very unlikely that any of the ancestors of the living beings has ever had even a remote resemblance with this (because it is far too dependent on continuously receiving complex cellular components and nutrients from outside; simplified parasitic living beings could appear only when there already existed sufficiently complex living hosts for the parasites).
Some components of this thing are growing by reproducing themselves, but like I have said, so does any crystal, thus it is difficult to choose a criterion that will distinguish with certainty what is living from what is non-living.
The growth is followed by a kind of division into 2 vesicles, but that happens by a mechanism very different from any living cell. Many inorganic things will split when growing over a certain size, so again it is hard to decide whether this can be called living.
> Its "life" is similar to that of a brain-dead human, whose body is not left to die by a bunch of machines that pump air into its lungs and nutrients through its blood vessels
A brain-dead human is alive, but just facing systemic collapse, aka death. That's not to imply that what the scientists here have created is alive, but the comparison isn't so apt.
As a multi-cellular organism, a brain-dead human is not alive, even if most of its cells may remain alive as long as they are fed from outside.
OK, what I have said above is not generally true, as some brain-dead humans may be more alive than others, e.g. some integrative functions, like some feedback loops that function through the endocrine system or through the autonomous nervous system, may still be working, connecting some organs with each other.
My comparison was with a very dead brain-dead human, who was reduced to the equivalent of a tissue culture.
These artificial cells also have some components that continue to work like in a living cell, doing some nucleic acid replication and some protein and lipid synthesis from precursors provided from outside, but they lack the capability to perform many of the chemical reactions that would be needed to close the complex network of feedback loops that enable a true living cell to live autonomously.
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.
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
Have you not seen Jurassic Park?
Have you not seen big shark?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2kCBlRZ4fA
Man, I am so tired of the cynicism around here.
Anytime you do something interesting or useful someone accuses you of trying to build the apocalypse.
Interesting. I pasted the article URL into Claude Opus 4.8, along with some questions about uses for cells that couldn't reproduce and Claude thought about it for a while, and then got murdered by the guardrails. I was invited to edit the question and try again; in a different chat. Or use a dumber model.
I suppose I can see why. But at the time I was just curious about the idea of "mule" cells.
Red blood cells can't reproduce and are "mule" cells - bags of hemoglobin. They are not really alive, so maybe not exactly what you were thinking of.
What are the guardrails here?
I've read than even a lot of high school biology questions can set off safety guardrails on Claude.
I'm curious what you asked? I had Opus 4.8 ingest the URL and give me some ideas about what's possible and it eventually got to AI and self repairing/improving factories along with listing risks etc.
Here's what I asked it:
"The idea of a cell that didn't reproduce at all occurred to me. Maybe created by a factory cell. It would be used to change an environment or produce some useful compound. I can imagine manufacturing them to process chemicals, or create mechanical structures. Put a network address in each one and they can be coordinated. The advantage of not reproducing is that they couldn't mutate if they had no reproduction mechanism at all. Can only come from the factory. Of course they could still be susceptible to viruses."
I've done a little googling since, and mule cells are actually a thing. In organisms they are very common. Neurons are an example. Parts of the immune system. There's also a thing in bacteria where cells divide, creating two daughter cells, one that can reproduce and one that can't. The one that can't makes a support structure around the one that can and then dies. This is how sporulation works.
None of this is deep, dark secret stuff. Some clumsy Wikipedia research got me this deep. If that's dangerous we are in deep sh*t.
(I'm not a biologist, I'm an animator who makes visualizations for university courses.)
A lot of high school biology underpins the most immediate interesting aspects of chemistry and biology, and also the most volatile and dangerous ones.
They're paranoid about people using AI to synthesise anthrax or something. You also can't ask it how to build a nuclear bomb.
Which shows why guardrails on AI are just dumb. What harm could come from answering your question? None.
I love exciting scientific news like this
I could have told them that this would work, it's pretty obvious!
For some reason, research like this has a much more apocalyptic feeling than it has in the past.
I'll be impressed when they can create an entire cell from scratch and it will start to divide. They can create all the needed precursors, bypassing millions of years of random permutation. Because until you have an entire working cell with replication, you have no retained benefit.
Craig Venter wanted to do this. But he died earlier this year.
This is literally how Cell was made. Cell Saga, here we go.
I wonder what animal or plant would grow out of that...
Neither. This is a single cell.
Replicating eukaryogenesis with synthetic components is something I hope to see in my lifetime.
Reminded me of Maturana and his autopoiesis.
se penso ad una cosa del genere mi vengono totalmente i brividi
"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe"
"And that is why God is far less interested in modern mortal affairs than Theists want Him to be." - [source forgotten]
Frankenstein!
this is how Sekiguchi Genetics got started. Or maybe Weyland Yutani Corporation
Uh-oh
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For the love of all things holy, can we not do these kinds of experiments on the same planet we live on?
Oh shut up, can we get some frontier stuff going without some doom and gloom. All this knowledge for all these years and next to no progress.
:(
I blame black mirror for this attitude. If you're going to speculate on imaginary futures why can't they be positive?
>why can't they be positive?
Because no one minds if good things happen...
That is closer to consciousness than AI will ever be. :)
Definitely. An implication of several strands of idealism is that we will be able to create artificial life (with consciousness)... it will just look like biology.
Elan conscietal? (a pun on elan vital)
yes
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Going by people’s reactions to AI, what will our reactions be to artificial humans generated from these methods?
Will they be hated? Killed off? Will they ever be see as legitimate, or just soulless beings, p-zombies.
From cells dividing to human generation there is a single step.
Similarly a program that runs on a computer, where its only interactions are strings of numbers is the same as an entity having to interact with the world.
Interesting, we should be able to have LLMs generate full genetic code or Inpaint into existing code that can be installed into a cell as DNA and have it divide out into any custom creature.
We could launch these custom bacteria in stasis to planets around the galaxy and seed life everywhere.
You should be able. Go for it.
> '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, as he disolves to red gray goo on live TV.
"The cell is not alive by any definition..." "But it’s the strongest demonstration yet that it is possible to generate life from nonlife."
Contradicting themself in the same paragraph.
The wheel is not a car. However a wheel is a strong indication that car-like structures are at least possible.
The wikipedia website to "It's alive" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It's_Alive) lists mostly horror movies. So I'm not sure this is good news.