[merksittich]

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...

[cmiles74]

I thought the NY Times article was pretty good, they had some nice illustrations.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/07/01/science/spudc...

[abrookewood]

That is way more comprehensible for me at least.

[oliverx0]

Crazy that a Cell reviewer would claim synthetic biology is not biology

[cperciva]

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!

[_zoltan_]

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.

[hoppp]

Too practical haha Maybe they just wanted hype?

[coldtea]

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.

[_zoltan_]

that's a very condescending view from you, to be honest.

[hilbertseries]

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.

[cperciva]

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).

[paulddraper]

> 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/

[psyphy2]

I'm not familiar with your work, but a more arch venue does sound like more appropriate to me as someone from arch?

[cperciva]

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?"

[oalae5niMiel7qu]

Submit it as a CVE.

[cperciva]

This was CVE-2005-0109.

[andromaton]

A lower key Putnam moment

[svnt]

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.

[ranger_danger]

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.

[oliverx0]

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.

[12_throw_away]

> 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]

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.

[ranger_danger]

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?

[cogman10]

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.

[1234letshaveatw]

Cause of all the theists at cell

[Aachen]

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

[oliverx0]

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.

[cookingmyserver]

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".

[hparadiz]

> 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>>

[paulddraper]

Eh, that doesn't make sense.

What's a meteor?

[cookingmyserver]

The streak of light generated by a small astronomical body as it moves through the atmosphere of earth (or another astronomical body).

[ferfumarma]

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.

[jibal]

> 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."

[MarkusQ]

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.

[jibal]

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."

[hparadiz]

> Exoplanets also aren't planets.

Imagine writing this.

[LeifCarrotson]

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.

[jibal]

> 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.

[ben_w]

> 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.

[antonvs]

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.

[Aerolfos]

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

[jibal]

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. "

[hparadiz]

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.

[ben_w]

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

[bouchard]

> “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.

[noosphr]

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.

[klustregrif]

> 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.

[riffraff]

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

[japanuspus]

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

[hallway_monitor]

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.

[root_axis]

> 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?

[riffraff]

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

[bouchard]

What field are you in that you'd actually wait two years, rather than retract your submission and go somewhere else?

[aiisjustanif]

Not in academia, but aware of the process, I was wondering just the same.

[oliverx0]

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

[vintagedave]

In fairness, it's a workaround against something that likely should not have happened. Problems require creative (aka unusual) solutions.

[bouchard]

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.

[Conscat]

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.

[Retric]

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.

[adjejmxbdjdn]

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.

[derektank]

>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?

[NuclearPM]

Why would it be an overreaction?

[iJohnDoe]

> 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.

[stale2002]

Journalists are meant to report on the news. This sounds like an interesting piece of science/news to me.

[im3w1l]

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"

[Lerc]

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.

[wyldberry]

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...

[stale2002]

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.

[IAmBroom]

"everyone" is overly constrained.

"The intended audience" is what is needed, and absolutely does require a middleman to publish it.

No blessing required.

[im3w1l]

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.

[twothreeone]

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.

[Maxion]

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!

[SubiculumCode]

Were these open reviews? Many times they are blinded, so unless they revealed their identity, you would not know.

[ben_w]

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.

[jschveibinz]

That is despicable behavior from a professional. How common is this in academia?

[IAmBroom]

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.

[IshKebab]

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.

[userulluipeste]

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).

[tstactplsignore]

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.

[twothreeone]

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.

[jrflo]

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.

[Gooblebrai]

> 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

[azan_]

The usual way of doing things is completely broken system.

[benwen]

Obligatory reference to Kuhn. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift