

I am one of the creators of the first "synthetic" bacterial cell. AMA - tomerico
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/c6kd6/i_am_one_of_the_creators_of_the_first_synthetic/

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paraschopra
This is how science should be done. Allowing lay people to understand true
significance of work by having an open exchange. Wish it were true for most of
the discoveries/inventions.

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JoeAltmaier
Notice the "discussion" devolved into nonsense almost immediately. Reddit....

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ohashi
I noticed some, I also noticed a lot of real questions. I don't see
complaining about it as much different than just having some level of
nonsense.

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JoeAltmaier
Sorry, didn't notice I was complaining. Thought I was making an observation on
the state of open discussion on the net. I guess that makes your post
"complaining about complaining", and this one ...

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dustingetz
_You did: wget<http://opendna.org/dna/mycoides.txt> then emailed it as an
attachment from your hotmail account to DNASyth LLC and they sent you back a
vial, you pulled up a bacteria, put a needle in it, squirted your lols into
it, and then wrote a paper. What parts are inaccurate? Was it a yahoo email
address?_

hahaha

[http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/c6kd6/i_am_one_of_the_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/c6kd6/i_am_one_of_the_creators_of_the_first_synthetic/c0qgerq)

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bonsaitree
How much of the work is Hamilton Smith's
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamilton_O._Smith> compared to Mr. Venter's? I
know he's not the type, but I'm really surprised that at least his name isn't
mentioned more often.

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Aetius
A question to those in the know: what kind of education / experience schedule
would one need to even think about doing work like this?

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crocowhile
What do you mean? You mean reproducing something like this in another lab? Any
MSc can do it, under the supervision of a PhD. The bottleneck factor in this
kind of experiments is money. I think they spent $1m only on the raw DNA
production and Venter got something like $40m funding from Exxon.

I have no idea how he convinced exxon that this stuff is any useful
technically speaking. It's very interesting scientifically, for sure, but
technically? Meh. I suppose exxon went for publicity.

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joegaudet
I suspect their goal is engineeting bacterium that will produce crude oil, or
something of that nature.

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crocowhile
The are talking about biofuel. The point is that no matter what you want to
do, there is no point in doing it by artificial synthesis. You can always
engineer one of the many bacteria/algae/whatever already present in nature,
modifying something that already does what you want to achieve, just making it
better.

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detcader
He admits he's an atheist! :D let's hope FOX News doesn't see that

we need an outlet, a website, where this can be done more frequently..

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raquo
On an unrelated note, I hate it that reddit (where content is _not_ localized)
defaults the interface language to that of my OS (why would I need that?),
while most websites of multinational corporations (where all content is
localized and country-specific) make me _manually_ select my country. Country
!= desired language, but both can be easily determined with comparable
precision (although by different means).</rant>

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loewenskind
Web sites need to just look at what your browser says is the prefered
language. Google still shows me german because I'm in a german speaking
country even though my settings are english. Drives me mad.

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avar
A lot of users run on misconfigured operating systems. I expect that Google
has done some homework on whether language-by-GeoIP makes sense for the
general case. They probably don't do it just to annoy you.

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loewenskind
I know they're not singling me out, but I personally think rewarding ignorant
behavior (to the cost of educated behavior!) is a bad strategy. Ideally, they
would have a button that says "not your language? Click here to set the
language and find out why sites keep showing you the wrong one".

EDIT: Actually, thinking about this more I don't think your point holds.
Nearly everyone who buys a PC in a given country will buy one set up for their
locale. Do you think that e.g. Germany is selling a bunch of computers
configured with english as the prefered language? I seriously doubt that.

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edanm
I'm in a non-English speaking country.

My best guess is that all normal users buy a computer with the local language,
but all technologically-minded users buy an English Windows (like me, for
example). It drives me mad whenever I visit Google on a browser whose cookies
I just cleared.

"I personally think rewarding ignorant behavior (to the cost of educated
behavior!) is a bad strategy."

Totally disagree. Most users couldn't care less about why things work the way
they do. They just want them to work. Google's job is to make the average
users have the most seamless experience possible, a job at which they excel.

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loewenskind
>Totally disagree. Most users couldn't care less about why things work the way
they do.

And this is exactly what should not be catered to. Especially when it's simple
to show users how to fix this. By jumping through such hoops to guess what is
correct they basically force everyone else to do the same thing or else appear
to be less "friendly" than google.

This kind of thinking is exactly what got us the HTML/CSS misery we have
today.

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whereas
Interesting answers, but redditors are fucking morons.

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ellyagg
Every time I go back there it's worse. Sometimes I read a thread on the main
reddit and it's virtually incomprehensible.

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jedberg
You need to not read the default list. I don't.

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blhack
Well somebody there needs to fix the problem that arises if you subscribe to
subreddits that don't have many stories on them.

I unsubscribed from all of them, then started over...currently I'm subscribed
to machinelearning, linguistics, and datasets. Often when I load the page,
there are only 2-3 stories on it...other times it will say "there is nothing
here".

I'm sure it's trying to just show me the newest stuff, but it would be nice if
it showed me _enough_ of the newest stuff to actually fill the page.

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jedberg
In your preferences, do you have it set to hide things that you've upvoted?

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blhack
No.

