Notes on Project Hail Mary.
From a protein person. Affectionate, but specific.
Just FYI.
I liked Project Hail Mary. I think anyone who writes an engaging, coherent story deserves accolades. Its 2021 release date is notable. It lands right on the precipice of the AI boom, yet early enough that I'm confident AI was not used to write it.
Reading it post-AI-boom felt like reading something from the dark age from the perspective of the enlightened. (This is a joke.)
My credentials.
Anyone has a right to critique anything. I, however, have the most right to critique biophysical chemistry informed by protein evolution. (This is a joke.)
That said, I do actually have training here:
Protein structure and function is my specialized training, and extremophiles are my scientific jam. Which is what makes PHM a more personal reading experience.
My top neat.
The systems of science, represented honestly.
Weir shows many specialized individuals and the difficulties of coordinating them. That's the part I'd expect fiction to flatten into one genius scientist, and he doesn't. He shows the committees, the handoffs, the rivalries, the translation problems between disciplines.
That's what I do for money as a project manager, and I think it is represented well. The rest of the ughs I can forgive because of this one neat.
My biggest ughs.
"Astrophage" is not a phage.
Astrophage, as described in PHM, are not phages. They are cells. "Astrocyte" was already taken. That's a specific type of cell in the brain, so I understand the naming bind. But "astrophage" is such a huge part of the story that I was genuinely disappointed more care wasn't placed in the name.
And there's a structural tell that closes the case: membranes. Membrane identity is how cells are classified. It's how they're grouped taxonomically, and it's how clinicians decide which antibiotics to prescribe.
I bring this up because it becomes an important plot point to "puncture" the cell. The existence of a membrane at all means it is not a phage. Phages are made of protein coats. Cells, as astrophage is described, have oily membranes made of fatty acids, of varying types. Those are not the same category of thing.
Study astrophage, but no clue about its DNA?
I think the first thing anyone would have done, given an unknown life form, is sequence it. Sequencing tells you what it's related to, the identity of its proteins, and therefore their predicted functions. Yes, they had a limited supply. But this would be far more powerful than anything you get from poking at the outside, and the sequence would have been made available by the time of launch. Grace would have known what he was working with before he woke up.
Instead, we watch him try to interrogate the organism from the outside in, and when he can't "break the cell," he moves on. Which leads to my other ugh inside this ugh:
If you can't mechanically lyse a cell, you try chemicals. That's not an advanced technique. Detergents, solvents, chaotropes. There are hundreds of options. "Can't break it" doesn't mean anything if you haven't exhausted the basic lysis toolbox.
If Grace were actually a molecular biologist, sequencing and a proper lysis screen would be day one and day two, not something he never gets around to. The book's version reads like a physicist's fantasy of how molecular biology works: first principles, from the outside in. In reality, we read the genome and let it tell us where to look.
The main argument against this is he was given "3 cells." ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The description of a "warm-blooded" single cell made me so mad.
"Warm-blooded" is a property of whole organisms with circulatory systems actively regulating their internal temperature against the environment. A single cell does not have a bloodstream, a metabolism-to-heat-budget, or a homeostatic setpoint in the way a mammal does. Talking about astrophage as "warm-blooded" collapses several levels of biological organization into one.
What you can say is that it stores enormous energy and is hot. That is different. Hot ≠ warm-blooded.
The broken peer review subplot: nuance needed.
"The scientific community had moved into overdrive in a very unscientific way. Gone were the days of careful peer review and published articles. Astrophage research was a free-for-all where researchers posted findings immediately and without proof. It led to misunderstandings and mistakes, but we just didn't have time to do things the right way." — Project Hail Mary, pp. 75
This is written as if it's a necessary evil of the crisis, but it's actually a pretty accurate description of a lot of normal science already: preprints, rapid iteration, results shared before formal review. COVID was a live demo of exactly this. The framing that "careful peer review" is the default and this is a degenerate state caused by panic is backwards. Peer review is important but it is also slow, and science routes around it constantly.
Also: "findings without proof" is a weird phrase. Findings are the evidence. I think he means "without independent replication," which is a real and different concern.
Eridian body temp ≠ pathogen-proof.
There's a moment where the high body temperature of Eridians gets treated as if it's generally protective against pathogens, as though heat is just an anti-germ property. This gets evolutionary reasoning backwards.
Evolution is an active arms race in context. Eridians live at high temperatures, so their pathogens have evolved to thrive at high temperatures. Their "COVID" can withstand the heat and infect them just fine, because that's the environment it was selected in. Being hot is not an immune system.
The correct version of that observation is: Eridians run hot, so there's no worry that Rocky catches any known-to-human/human-cultivated pathogens. Human pathogens are adapted to ~37°C bodies. They would be cooked in Rocky. There is a protective effect, but it only works across species and against our germs specifically, not against germs in general.
Smaller ughs.
06 "meters per second squared"
Acceleration is meters per second per second. "Squared" is mathematically correct and also the way physicists talk on paper, but spelled out in narration it reads as if the unit is some exotic thing. "Per second per second" is what you'd actually say out loud, and it's clearer about what acceleration is: a rate of change of a rate.
07 "x-ray" vs "X-ray"
The X in X-ray is capitalized. It's not short for anything. Röntgen named the phenomenon X because it was unknown. It's a proper noun by historical accident and it has stayed that way for 130 years!!! This is a copy-editor nit but it came up enough to be distracting.
08 "it breeds in the sun"
Nice but how.
09 monoculture ecology
The idea that one species is doing all of this, with no co-evolved community, no symbionts, no actual phages preying on it, is the cleanest fictional microbiology I've ever seen. Real microbial communities are a soup. An organism this abundant would have a whole ecosystem attached to it.