151–160 of 306 posts
But yeah, you might never get into it if it were taught to you as dry mumbo jumbo, like
Type 4 secretion system: ii- Pilus biogenesis
That's why they invented computer visualisations. Check out the molecular apparatus on the surface of the bacterium. It uses it to inject DNA into another nearby bacterium!
Ah yes, the recurring obsession hacker news has with biology - except that no startup would pay a biologist a software engineer's wage. Talking about biology is nice. But what's nicer is dismantling the elephant in the room.
I think this depends a bit on the area. I work in the field of metabolic engineering (i.e. engineering microbes to make new products). When I worked at a biotech company in the Bay Area, I had a pretty decent salary, while still a bit lower than software engineers. Right now, I live in the Netherlands and my guess is that the discrepancy is a big larger here.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this depends a bit on the area. I work in the field of metabolic engineering (i.e. engineering microbes to make new products). When I worked at a biotech company in the Bay Area, I had a pretty decent salary, while still a bit lower than software engineers. Right now, I live in the Netherlands and my guess is that the discrepancy is a big larger here.
Hey I am in my masters of bioinformatics in the Netherlands and was wondering what kinds of salaries you are seeing for metabolic engineering and related fields. In my uni things like salaries rarely get discussed but I think it's quite important.
After 15 years in tech and a life-changing psychedelic trip, I decided to self-learn genetic engineering and share it with the world[1][2] while I look for a meaningful biotech venture to found. What you can do today from your kitchen or home lab is remarkable. For instance, I taught myself PCR (polymerase chain reaction) and recently published my first genetic sequence at GenBank from fungi that I cultured, extracte…
Biology is pretty broad a field. Science of the living.
The biggest books I ever bought were those on molecular biology and biochemistry. Huge and weighing several kilos. Until then I did not know that it was possible to produce such large paperbacks at all. Some of these books are also among the best I have ever seen in terms of design and didactics. This is also necessary because the area is so big that you can easily spend several lives with it.
I agree with the author that molecular biology is neglected in school or is often not taught in a very motivating way. But this is true for many fields of knowledge, not only for molecular biology.
My entry into the field was when I did a PhD in molecular biology and biophysics after ten years of professional experience as a computer scientist. That was almost twenty years ago now, and I still have the feeling that I'm only scratching the surface.
I read this and it it fills me with so much melancholy. I took biology 101 in college and what I thought would be really interesting turned out to be SO unexpectedly meaningless. Now years later all I recall is the memorization of phylums and kingdoms on one test and cell structures on another test and sitting in a large auditorium looking at the map and not the territory. The course was so much about WHAT and never…
> The course was so much about WHAT and never about WHY. Biology is pretty notorious for most stuff being arbitrary. There is no model. People who say there's a model, they're talking about something else - sometimes, a literal Platonic ideal of biology, that makes for an appealing pop science course, but not knowledge that like, helps you design experiments or better use drugs or whatever. From the article: > It was…
This is something that lots of people, and especially people in the tech industry, keep forgetting. They go ''well i can calculate partial differential equations, did a course on topology ánd created an api based on open data, how hard can this 'biology' actually be???'' and then it turns out that yes, it is hard.
This isn't just biology, it's school . The only time you're taught processes and methods, it's when they're busywork, and you're wasting a year memorising how to do something nobody does any more because we have computers and calculators. What you're being taught is to squash your individuality, demand and follow orders, and to seek your worth only in the approval of your betters. But most of all, you're being kept o…
This isn't just biology, it's school . The only time you're taught processes and methods, it's when they're busywork, and you're wasting a year memorising how to do something nobody does any more because we have computers and calculators. What you're being taught is to squash your individuality, demand and follow orders, and to seek your worth only in the approval of your betters. But most of all, you're being kept o…
You made me exhale in amusement at this comment, because it is true to a degree. Do you think most people don't actually mind this kind of education? I'm asking because I'm baffled this is the way education seems to work in most places and has done for ages . I also assume that something would eventually change if enough people disagreed. Or might it be because that is still how we think about the employer-employee r…
I have microbiology and electrical engineering degrees. Started a PhD (microbiology and immunology) and washed out with a masters to go into the dot com boom. There is so much potential for biology to be engineering, but the reality is you can spend your whole life studying one tiny aspect of something esoteric. You can spend your whole life trying to find one amazing cure (or not). Biology is great if you are intere…
That's probably because people choose to test only the most obvious hypotheses. There s an amazing amount of data but it s mostly at the level of "describing the clouds". there seems to be a need for theoretical breakthroughs
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was difficult and I wouldn't recommend it for newcomers.
Weren't you a (very depressed) newcomer yourself? Don't take it bad but someone in an already bad mental state taking 2g more than what McKenna considered a god dose is pretty ... irresponsible (?)
Edit:// for reference i am talking about dried golden teachers. There are stronger variants out there.