Comment by merksittich
20 hours 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...
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.
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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.
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I'm not familiar with your work, but a more arch venue does sound like more appropriate to me as someone from arch?
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Submit it as a CVE.
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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.
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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.
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> 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."
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> Exoplanets also aren't planets.
Imagine writing this.
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> “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.
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What field are you in that you'd actually wait two years, rather than retract your submission and go somewhere else?
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As an outside observer, it does seem that the whole process is tedious, capricious, and corrupt. No wonder academia is crumbling - it deserves to, and it needs to be replaced with a new, better system.
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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.
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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.
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That is despicable behavior from a professional. How common is this in academia?
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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