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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, whic
by merksittich 3mo ago
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-marks-major-step-toward-building-life-scratch https://www.science.org/content/article/lab-created-spudcell...
- oliverx0 3mo agoCrazy that a Cell reviewer would claim synthetic biology is not biology
- cogman10 3mo agoWell 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.
- 1234letshaveatw 3mo agoCause of all the theists at cell
- Aachen 3mo agoExoplanets 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
- hparadiz 3mo ago> Exoplanets also aren't planets. Imagine writing this.
- Aerolfos 3mo agoActually, 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
- hparadiz 3mo agoI'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.
- ben_w 3mo agoIt'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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WISE_0855%E2%88%920714
- jibal 3mo agoIt's perfectly irrelevant to the thread.
- ben_w 3mo agoThis thread is ~ "Exoplanets also aren't planets": discuss As the easiest to discover exoplanets (and all the early ones except pulsar planets) are gas giants, and the comment I was directly replying to had "Like a gas giant orbiting a star. It's obviously a planet", therefore "gas giants are failed stars and shouldn't count as planets" is not at all irrelevant. Even further up to the point of if these are or are not cell, it illustrates how taxonomical categories are made by humans for humans. Historically, any connection to natural laws in taxonomies is often mere coincidence.
- ranger_danger 3mo agoNot 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.
- oliverx0 3mo agoThat'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.
- 12_throw_away 3mo ago> 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)
- FloorEgg 3mo agoThis 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.
- ranger_danger 3mo ago
- cperciva 3mo agoMy 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!
- oalae5niMiel7qu 3mo agoSubmit it as a CVE.
- cperciva 3mo agoThis was CVE-2005-0109.
- andromaton 3mo agoA lower key Putnam moment
- psyphy2 3mo agoI'm not familiar with your work, but a more arch venue does sound like more appropriate to me as someone from arch?
- cperciva 3mo agoFrankly, 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?"
- 3mo ago
- svnt 3mo agoIt'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.
- bouchard 3mo ago> “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.
- vintagedave 3mo agoIn fairness, it's a workaround against something that likely should not have happened. Problems require creative (aka unusual) solutions.
- bouchard 3mo agoRejections 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.
- NuclearPM 3mo agoWhy would it be an overreaction?
- nullsanity 3mo ago[dead]
- Conscat 3mo agoIt 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.
- Retric 3mo agoJournalists 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.
- twothreeone 3mo agoThe 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.
- Maxion 3mo agoMy 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!
- SubiculumCode 3mo agoWere these open reviews? Many times they are blinded, so unless they revealed their identity, you would not know.
- ben_w 3mo agoWhen 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.
- jschveibinz 3mo agoThat is despicable behavior from a professional. How common is this in academia?
- IshKebab 3mo agoHard 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.
- benwen 3mo agoObligatory reference to Kuhn. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift
- cmiles74 3mo agoI thought the NY Times article was pretty good, they had some nice illustrations. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/07/01/science/spudcells-synthetic-cell.html?unlocked_article_code=1.uVA.6Rwg.20U5t0kLK6oU&smid=nytcore-ios-share https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/07/01/science/spudc...
- abrookewood 3mo agoThat is way more comprehensible for me at least.
- azan_ 3mo agoThe usual way of doing things is completely broken system.
- Gooblebrai 3mo ago> 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