Philip Ball

Yes, that language was probably too figurative. The picture I get is of the enzyme channeling some of the reaction free energy into specific degrees of freedom, rather than it just being dissipated.

Yes, I've seen discussions like that - Ramin Golestanian, for example, has talked about it in the context of the PE surface. I knew you'd have good ideas about it too!

Some public-health experts and science commentators were saying this at the time. For all the wonders of rapid tests and then vaccines, we could not science our way out of problems that were not science problems at their core.

Ian has a way of getting to the nub. This is basically the kind of thing I wrote to Tim Davie about in 2020, though I had no idea how bad it would get. Most of the media has not the slightest notion how to handle a situation like this, and instead tries desperately to normalize it.

The idea of a link between Maxwell's demon and living organisms goes back a long way. I'm always a bit surprised that Schrödinger missed it in What Is Life?, not least because (as I say in this piece) he corresponded extensively with Frederick Donnan, who suggested it in the 1920s.

Maxwell’s demon might lurk in enzyme behaviour The controversial process of enhanced enzyme diffusion could enable living systems to resist local equilibrium

When enzymes catalyse reactions, sometimes it seems they receive a little motive kick. This "enhanced enzyme diffusion" is strange and controversial, but a new proposal says it makes them like Maxwell's demon. I examined that notion for @chemistryworld.com
www.chemistryworld.com/opinion/maxw...

They'll be very small businesses. Nano businesses.

Meet the 'quantum plumbers’ uncovering the mysteries of fluid mechanics at the nanoscale – Physics World Philip Ball investigates the strange quantum effects that control water flow in carbon nanotubes

physicsworld.com/a/meet-the-q...

Meet the 'quantum plumbers’ uncovering the mysteries of fluid mechanics at the nanoscale – Physics World Philip Ball investigates the strange quantum effects that control water flow in carbon nanotubes

Oh, it's a thing - though probably not that thing.
physicsworld.com/a/meet-the-q...

Oh wow! Many congratulations - thoroughly deserved!

Two decades of induced pluripotent stem cell research: From discovery to diverse applications Since the discovery of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) 20 years ago, iPSC technology has transformed stem cell research and regenerative medicine. This perspective reviews key advances in repro...

Two decades of iPSCs - a timely overview from Shinya Yamanaka.
www.cell.com/cell-stem-ce...

It's a strange thing. There was a small but vocal bunch of scientists shrieking (rather ahistorically) about Lysenko when their enemy was "wokeness", from whom we seem to hear nothing now.
pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...

Yup, especially when it comes to RFK Jr’s most important ally, Jay Bhattacharya—the parallels with Lysenko are uncanny

This piece by virologist @angierasmussen.bsky.social, one of the Editors in Chief of the journal Vaccine is 🔥🔥🔥

geneticliteracyproject.org/2025/08/28/v...

It's a peculiar thing. The BBC repeatedly gets into a mess, but meanwhile, Ros Atkins again and again does the kind of job that no one else does and which represents the best values of the Corporation - simply by laying out the facts clearly and calmly.

Everyone in my lab plays with AlphaGenome. It is good at what it does, but what it does is very limited, because it is only trained on data from a handful of cell lines. To me the big gap is in the complexity of the human body, in all the cell types and how they change over time in development – and all that data is missing. We have got pretty good information on what sequences are important, but when we went into AlphaGenome it couldn’t predict any of them because it has never seen data from a developing limb in an embryo or a developing eye. It is good at what it’s trained on, but not very good at the complexity of cell types in the body.

And here is an excerpt from the transcript of my interview with someone who works on human gene regulation. Says it all.

Dreams of a synthetic genome In June, 2025, the Wellcome Trust announced an ambitious £10 million UK project called the Synthetic Human Genome Project (SynHG) and claimed it “will unlock a deeper understanding of life, leading to...

This might be relevant to the discussion too.
www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

I didn't - thanks so much Ewen, looks really interesting.

What distinguishes the elephant from E. coli: Causal spreading and the biological principles of metazoan complexity - PubMed Jacques Monod famously said that 'What is true for <i>E. coli</i> is true for the elephant.' While this might be correct in the basic sense that both use nucleic acids and proteins, it is no longer clear that they use them in quite the same way. The many qualitative differences in the biomolecular c …

You got there just before I added this to the thread. Yes indeed!
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37194562/

I'll say more about this in a forthcoming article.
Also, FWIW: I don't consider synthesizing a genome based on existing genomes and putting it in a living cell to be making "synthetic life". That sets the bar way too low.

What distinguishes the elephant from E. coli: Causal spreading and the biological principles of metazoan complexity - PubMed Jacques Monod famously said that 'What is true for <i>E. coli</i> is true for the elephant.' While this might be correct in the basic sense that both use nucleic acids and proteins, it is no longer clear that they use them in quite the same way. The many qualitative differences in the biomolecular c …

Over the past week I've had discussions with several experts who *really* know their stuff in this regard, and they confirmed and deepened my scepticism. It's important we don't make casual conceptual leaps from bacteria to humans. That has misled us in the past.
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37194562/

AlphaGenome: On the Promise and Limits of AI in Science PHILIP BALL | According to the old story, we once thought that all this other DNA was just “junk,” a term coined in this context in the 1970s. It was accumulated over the course of evolution, for exam...

For that, qualitatively different considerations come into play. Metazoan genomes are in many ways *not like* prokaryotic ones. It's not just more of the same. Coping with different cell types is a massive issue. I discussed some of these things here.
www.marginaliareviewofbooks.com/post/alpha-g...

AI can write genomes — how long until it creates synthetic life? The Evo2 genomic language model can generate short genome sequences, but scientists say further advances are needed to write genomes that will work inside living cells.

Ewen's writeup of the new Evo 2 paper in Nature is reliably good. I can imagine this foundation model will be useful for doing synthetic biology in microbes.
But it's important to recognize that making this work for eg humans is not just a scaling-up issue...
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Was the Turing Test always meaningless? A meeting to celebrate the 75th anniversary of Alan Turing’s famous paper drew a fairly unanimous judgment from the expert speakers

Thanks Eddy. There's a debate to be had, for sure. It's an exaggeration to say that *no one* takes the TT seriously, but I stand by the claim that few experts do. That was certainly the consensus of this recent Royal Society meeting:
www.thenewworld.co.uk/philip-ball-...

I never knew until now that Electric Avenue in Brixton was called that even in the late 19th C. It was the first street market to be lit with electric lights. South Londoners can't help but now associate it with Eddy Grant. In the 1910s Madame Ziska told fortunes there with a crystal ball.

Thought Machine (d'Odiardi) - Kook Science

TIL about Savary d'Odiardo's Thought Machine and its use by the psychic Cheiro. Fabulous stuff. I wonder if it still exists?
hatch.kookscience.com/wiki/Thought...

There are qualitatively different challenges for eukaryotes and especially metazoans. I have been speaking to some expert folks about this just in the past week or so, and they confirmed all of my feelings about limitations, and added to them. But as a tool for basic synth bio it should be useful.

I've just read Ewen's news story, not yet the paper. The news story offers some appropriate caveats, but it seems nice work and all quite plausible. And... using this for more than microbes, and especially for humans, is of course not just a scaling-up issue...

🙏

"Do not make vermilion or lead white or orpiment outside a professional setting" would be good advice though.

I've come across folks who do the mineral-grinding thing, and love the idea. And also of course lots of people making plant dyes. But "synthesizing pigments" implied something even beyond that - real (and potentially dangerous) chemistry.