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I should have loved biology

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Re: I should have loved biology

#231

Post by animal_spirits »

nkrisc wrote: post #196
john_minsk wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to start a holy war, but what is the difference at the end of the day? Isn't one just faster?

One occurs naturally and thus happens all around us without human interaction. So there's value in understanding how things work without any input from humans. One is more like studying a natural process while the other is the mechanics of that process.

Yes exactly. The fruit might be the same at the end of the day; red, round, juicy. But there is more that goes into growing fruit than just reaping the end product. There is fertilizers which run off into lakes [1], pesticides and herbicides that get into the soil increasingly making soil less fertile [2], market cornering tactics like seed patenting [3]. I think it is more important to study how to make nature do the work of growing food abundantly with as little side-effects as possible, instead of engineering it to with no caution for side-effects.

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fertilizer-runoff...

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC91132/

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowman_v._Monsanto_Co.

Re: I should have loved biology

#232

Post by julius_set »

A lot of it is tied to the dog and pony show that is pre-med. You have 90% of the class interested in going to Medical/Dental school. So most students are NOT interested in the WHY but the How can I get an A.

Re: I should have loved biology

#233

Post by nynx »

bergstromm466 wrote: post #141
nynx wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a really inspiring comment. I'm an engineering student who's kind of mentally stuck between the worlds of computing and bio. I want to do research in biotech, but I'm having trouble finding the will to do it for some reason. In a different vein, I've recently started designing a really cheap atomic force microscope, which I plan to open-source, so I think that may be a valuable addition to the bio and nanotec…

> I've recently started designing a really cheap atomic force microscope, which I plan to open-source, so I think that may be a valuable addition to the bio and nanotech diy community. I hope you do

Thank you, hopefully external validation will push me to actually complete the project.

Re: I should have loved biology

#234

Post by dekhn »

nynx wrote: post #87
joshuamcginnis wrote: post #41

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…

This is a really inspiring comment. I'm an engineering student who's kind of mentally stuck between the worlds of computing and bio. I want to do research in biotech, but I'm having trouble finding the will to do it for some reason. In a different vein, I've recently started designing a really cheap atomic force microscope, which I plan to open-source, so I think that may be a valuable addition to the bio and nanotec…

AFM isn't really used in biology.

Re: I should have loved biology

#235

Post by kls »

Melting_Harps wrote: post #221
kls wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed 100%, I have a troubled kid in school right now, who is off the charts smart but the only thing he will apply himself to is Advanced Math, Auto Shop and his Culinary program. If it's not hands on or mechanical he just has no interest in rote memorization. School needs to fundamentally change especially for adolescent males, it just stacks the decks against the high functioning learn by doing types. I often won…

> Agreed 100%, I have a troubled kid in school right now, who is off the charts smart but the only thing he will apply himself to is Advanced Math, Auto Shop and his Culinary program. If it's not hands on or mechanical he just has no interest in rote memorization. School needs to fundamentally change especially for adolescent males, it just stacks the decks against the high functioning learn by doing types. I often w…

I agree with you, I augment their education and he excels when we work on Robotics, programming, Welding, fabrication and he has a love for math because very early on as I was teaching him these things, I was constantly showing him how to solve the problems at a more fundamental level with math. He learned math as a means to cut thru the red tape and as proofs, he learned the real world value of it very early on.

Re: I should have loved biology

#237

Post by LeifCarrotson »

Sophistifunk wrote: post #98

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…

It depends on the curriculum and the teachers.

Some teachers can get super excited about sharing the amazing stuff that's the results of their field. Sure, there's a bit of jargon and memorization to be able to discuss the problem. You can't be amazed by the results of concentration gradients, gene expression on the formation of proteins if you think concentration means something about your eyebrows, gradients are a function of WordArt, gene was a guy who played Willy Wonka, expressions are things your face does, and protein is a number on your dad's whey powder.

If you can make students excited about using, testing, and comprehending the awesome information about their world that are just behind a minor speed bump of some jargon you need to cross, most will hurdle those difficulties as if it was effortless. The standardized tests that check whether they know the jargon will be just a wasted day that they don't get to learn more about the subject!

If, instead, you set the end goal as passing the standardized test that checks whether they know the jargon or not, they'll begrudgingly do the minimum required to not get in too much trouble. The tragedy is that kids who don't even know the bare minimum jargon are often unprepared to function as independent adults, and so the rational, fair, game-theoretic optimum outcome demands resources need to be allocated to help those more than they need to be allocated to help those who are already functional.

Also, there's the tragedy that teachers who pour their hearts into their students aren't adequately valued by society - we pay lawyers and administrators huge sums of money as if what they do is more important than what my 9th grade bio teacher did while using his weekends to crawl through the mud on bog walks to learn about sphagnum mosses and carnivorous plants with some kids he met for an hour a day for 8 months, while barely keeping his family out of poverty.

Re: I should have loved biology

#238

Post by dekhn »

As a computer nerd in high school, a teacher gave us a Scientific American article about molecular biology- you know, the central dogma and things downstream. I read it. It took me days- I had to read each paragraph slowly, and understood what it said before I could proceed. It seemed really neat- like being put in front of a computer with no manual and being asked to document how it works.

I continued to pursue biology in undergrad, learning some excellent underlying basis (that Roche Biochemistry pathways poster? I had it memorized by the end of my junior year) and getting some experience in the new field of sequence analysis (at the time, E.Coli was being sequenced, and you could FTP the new sequences when the showed up on the server). I worked with some very early machine learning in '95 to build gene classifiers.

This seemed like a good area to work in ("molecular biologists make $70K/year!") so I went to grad school and continued to learn deep biology and work in computational biology along with some wet lab work (whcih I'm terrible at). Postdoc as well- I was on my way to being a Professor of Biology. But, realistically, I couldn't compete with high end postdocs and decided instead to go into industry as a computer scientist.

I've still dabbled in biology- my long term passion is still to build a warehouse-scale biology lab with a tightly coupled robotic experiment framework and machine learning system to do automated biology. A number of people are working in this area and all failing, but writing wonderful PR that makes it sound like they're solving the world's problems. Biology has a huge hype problem- remember when it was promised that genomics was going to cure all human diseases?

I've dropped all biology and returned to computers (with some hardware hacking). It's a real relief- everything makes sense, the engineering is straightforward, you can do it in your garage without contaminating all your surfaces.

Re: I should have loved biology

#239

Post by ardy42 »

throwaway316943 wrote: post #202
kls wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed 100%, I have a troubled kid in school right now, who is off the charts smart but the only thing he will apply himself to is Advanced Math, Auto Shop and his Culinary program. If it's not hands on or mechanical he just has no interest in rote memorization. School needs to fundamentally change especially for adolescent males, it just stacks the decks against the high functioning learn by doing types. I often won…

It boggles my mind how broken the model of rote memorization to pass written tests is. School should teach you the fundamentals of how to acquire knowledge and then get out of your way. Reading, writing, speaking, logic, geometry, mathematics, and programming along with a whirlwind tour of all the good and bad ideas throughout history then pack it up. Instead we have a public babysitting service that pretends to add…

> It boggles my mind how broken the model of rote memorization to pass written tests is. School should teach you the fundamentals of how to acquire knowledge and then get out of your way.

That's utopian and a rather unrealistic, incomplete view. Education is also about imparting a fundamental shared body of knowledge as well, and it also has to deal with a very wide diversity of ability and motivation. Your proposal is pretty lacking in specifics, but what you have in mind seems to be something that's optimized to work very well with an idealized student, which would only be a small fraction of all students, and would likely do worse on average when considering all students.

> Reading, writing, speaking, logic, geometry, mathematics, and programming along with a whirlwind tour of all the good and bad ideas throughout history then pack it up.

That's a weird list. You include programming but not civics?

Re: I should have loved biology

#240

Post by billfruit »

joshuamcginnis wrote: post #41

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…

Any books you would recommend for someone coming from CS background to get a jump start on this topic.
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