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> 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...
Imagine writing this.
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.
That's being kind; it's a complete overreaction, simply put.
TL;DR politics breaks everything.
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.
Instead, your learn 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.
Human 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.
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.
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.
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.
(not just grumpy because that's what I did my PhD research on)
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?
“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.
Also known as the fallacy of “generalizing from fictional evidence”.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rHBdcHGLJ7KvLJQPk/the-logica...
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Mainstream Christianity was not not biblical literalist anyway. Read what Augustine or Origen had to say about interpreting Genesis.
You can’t win
Kurzweil puts it between 2029-2032 and that seems right to me
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity
I’m no 7 day creationist but haha my guy…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_fermentation
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...
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"
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.)
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.
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.
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.
Anytime you do something interesting or useful someone accuses you of trying to build the apocalypse.
Also, go MN!
Or like a grad student didn’t dispose of their work properly and are desperately trying to distract from their scandal.
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!
Replicating eukaryogenesis with synthetic components is something I hope to see in my lifetime.
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
Will they be hated? Killed off? Will they ever be see as legitimate, or just soulless beings, p-zombies.
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.
We could launch these custom bacteria in stasis to planets around the galaxy and seed life everywhere.
Because no one minds if good things happen...
Contradicting themself in the same paragraph.