Lee Cronin
speaker
545 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2023
last heard Jun 2024
Lee Cronin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
You must be committing fraud.
Right.
Long story, probably a boring story. But in this case, it went out to review, the comments came back, and the comments were incredibly... They were very deep comments from all the reviewers. But the nice thing was the reviewers were kind of... very critical, but not dismissive. They were like, oh, really? Explain this, explain this, explain this, explain this. Are you sure it's not Kamigolerov?
Are you sure it's not this? And we went through, I think, three rounds of review pretty quick. And the editor went, yeah, it's in.
Um, it's, uh, I think it's, uh, um, I mean, this paper for me kind of, cause this wasn't the first time we tried to publish assembly theory at the highest level, the nature communications paper, we on the mass spec on the, on the idea went through, went to nature and got rejected, went through six rounds of review and got rejected, uh,
And I just was so confused when the chemist said, this can't be possible. I do not believe you can measure complexity using mass spec. And also, by the way, molecules, complex molecules can randomly form. And we're like, but look at the data. The data says. And they said, no, no, we don't believe you. And we went and I just wouldn't give up.
I don't normally get emotional about papers, but, um, it's not about giving it up because we want to get it published because we want the glory or anything. It's just like, why don't you understand? And so, um, So what I would just try to be as rational as possible and say, yeah, you didn't like it. Tell me why. And then, sorry, let me see. Silly.
Never get emotional about papers normally, but I think what we did, you just compressed like five years of angst from this.
not just rough it's like it happened you know i came up with the assembly equation you know remote from sarah in arizona and the people sfi i felt like i was a mad person like you know the guy in depicted in in a in a beautiful mind he was just like not not the actual genius part but just the yeah
because i kept writing expanded and i have no mathematical ability oh and i was expand i was making these mathematical expansions where i kept seeing the same motif again i was like oh i think this is a copy number the same string is coming again again again i kept i couldn't do the math and then i realized the copy number fell out of the equation and everything collapsed down i was like oh that works kind of so we submitted the paper and then when it was
almost accepted, right? The mass spec one. And it was astrobiologists said, great. You know, a mass spectroscopist said, great. And the chemist went, nonsense, like biggest pile of nonsense ever, fraud, you know? And I was like, but why fraud? And they just said, just because. And I was like, well, and so, and I could not convince the editor in this case.
The editor was just so pissed off because they see it as like a kind of, you know, you're wasting my time. And I would not give up. I wrote, I went and dissected, you know, all the parts. And I think, although, I mean, I got upset about it, you know, it was kind of embarrassing actually, but I guess. Beautiful. Yeah. But it was just trying to understand why they didn't like it.
So part of me was like really devastated and a part of me was super excited because I'm like, huh, they can't tell me why I'm wrong. And this kind of goes back to, you know, when I was at school, I was in a kind of learning difficulties class and I kept going to the teacher and say, you know,
you know how what do i do today to prove i'm smart and they were like nothing you can't i was like give me a job you know give me something to do give me a job to do something to do as we um and i kind of felt like that a bit when i was arguing with the and not arguing there's no ad hominem i wasn't telling the editor they were idiots or anything like this or the the reviewers i kept it strictly like factual and all i did is i just kept knocking it down bit by bit by bit by bit by bit
It was ultimately rejected and it got published elsewhere. And then the actual experimental data. So this is kind of, in this paper, the experimental justification was already published. So when we did this one and we went through the versions and then we sent it in and in the end it just got accepted, we were like, well, that's kind of cool, right?
This is kind of like, you know, some days you have, you know, the student, sorry, the first author was like, I can't believe it got accepted. I was like, nor am I. But it's great. It's good. And then when the paper was published, I was not expecting the backlash.
I was expecting computational... No, actually, I was just expecting one person had been trolling me for a while about it, just to carry on trolling. But I didn't expect the backlash. And then I wrote to the editor and apologized. And the editor was like, what are you apologizing for? It was a great paper. Of course it's going to get backlash. You said some controversial stuff. But it's awesome.
That's the science. As I said to, you know, when it got accepted, and people were saying, were kind of like hacking on it. And I was like...
papers are not gold medals the reason i wanted to publish that paper in nature is because it says hey there's something before biological evolution you have to have that if you're not a creationist by the way this is an approach first time someone has put a concrete mechanism or sorry a concrete quantification and what comes next you're pushing on is a mechanism and
And that's what we need to get to is an autocanalytic set, self-replicating molecules, some other features that come in. And the fact that this paper has been so discussed, for me, is a dream come true. Like, it doesn't get better than that. If you can't accept a few people hating it, and the nice thing is, the thing that really makes me happy
Showing 261–280 of 545 · page 14 of 28
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