I should have loved biology • Hacker News Board

Re: I should have loved biology

#251

Post by koeng » Thu, Nov 19, 2020, 4:08 PM UTC

dekhn wrote: post #238

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 biol…

Should check out Opentrons! I run a couple out of my home lab and they're great for automating biotech procedures. You can get 90% the way to full automation with like 10% the cost.

Re: I should have loved biology

#252

Post by Balgair » Thu, Nov 19, 2020, 4:09 PM UTC

veddox wrote: post #185

joshuamcginnis wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go to scholar.google.com, search "autoimmune disease treatment", filter by last five years, use sci-hub to read the paper. Repeat until you learn enough to find your next step forward.

Absolutely not. You probably won't understand 10% of what you read. Better: go to your local university library, check out a good medicine/biology textbooks, and read that. Then go read the papers.

Per the article, a deep dive is likely better than a general overview. Also, OP says to repeat until it clicks, which is generally correct.

But the real issue still stands: Bio is hyper complex and it takes a long time to get used to the nomenclature and ideas.

Re: I should have loved biology

#253

Post by Balgair » Thu, Nov 19, 2020, 4:11 PM UTC

bboygravity wrote: post #163

hnmm23 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i asked this elsehwere in the thread, and if you scroll lower you'll see why i want to learn but this is going to sound like a bit of a ramble as im tired and feeling passionate and emotional right now but bear with me... ..if i want to learn more bio not bc i want to hack or edit genes or whatever but because of reasons such as: understanding autoimmune diseases, the treatments for them, relationship to other issues…

I'm an electronics/embedded programming guy and I "accidentally" learned biology by listening to a great bunch of podcasts while going to sleep and commuting. At first you won't get all the terminology, but if you keep listening you'll eventually get it (that's how it worked for me). The cool thing is that you'll dive right into the state of the art of academic research by the very people who do the research and writ…

> At first you won't get all the terminology, but if you keep listening you'll eventually get it (that's how it worked for me).

It's kinda like a cooking show. At first, you have no idea what they are doing, but after season three you just know that they don't have enough time to do a proper raspberry vinaigrette before the gong strike.

Re: I should have loved biology

#254

Post by watwut » Thu, Nov 19, 2020, 4:13 PM UTC

throwaway316943 wrote: post #219

watwut wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder how many talented scientists never got started because they were turned off by their first exposure to a subject. On the positive side, we dont need more scientists. There are too many people trying to be scientists leading to pretty shitty working conditions for PhDs and post docs.

That is being caused by exactly the same nonsense that has been happening in high schools. You have to get a high school degree. Why? No one knows. Everyone has a high school degree so you have to get a college degree. Everyone has a college degree so you need to have a masters degree. On and on until the whole thing is a diploma mill and society collapses under the sheer weight of puffed up do nothings grubbing at t…

It is not? PhD is not particularly necessary for anything except working in universities and few labs. People who do PhD do it because they want to do science, not because they would thought it is necessary.

Re: I should have loved biology

#255

Post by infinite8s » Thu, Nov 19, 2020, 4:18 PM UTC

svara wrote: post #172

madrox wrote: post #142

Of course Feynman had something to say about this: "You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing — that's what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something." I knew this intuitively at a very young age, wh…

He's making an interesting point that's largely true, but not the whole truth. It's the typical physicist arrogance towards biology. ;) For example, evolution through natural selection would not have been understood if Darwin and Wallace hadn't put great effort into cataloguing and classifying species. You might say they obviously were thinking about mechanisms at the same time, but the cataloguing was the preconditi…

The same was true of physics (for example, Tycho Brahe's extensive astronomical measurements paved the way for Copernicus's heliocentrism model and Newton's later theories of mechanics).

Re: I should have loved biology

#256

Post by tito » Thu, Nov 19, 2020, 4:28 PM UTC

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…

Same pathway as the author!

In high school, biology class meant memorizing modules of the human heart and pricking my finger to find out what my blood type was (I stayed home sick that day). "Loving biology" meant carrying around AP Bio books thicker than an unabridged Webster dictionary. No thanks.

Then later in college, my friend said it would be fun if we both took the genetics class he needed to take for his pre-med reqs. I agreed, and then bombed the class exam after exam.

One day right before Thanksgiving, when all the students are checked out, the profs got up and demoed their research.

They got up and showed us BLAST, the 3 GB human genome, and software tools to search the genome. Most importantly, these 2 professors, masters of the genetics universe as they were, made lots of mistakes while demoing the software. They "oops"ed their way through this and that and said it was ok because the human genome had just recently been sequenced and it was all still new.

"It's a UNIX system! I know this" popped into my head, and I promptly declared myself a biotech entrepreneur. After class I went up to the teachers and told them I would build them better software tools for genetics. Then I wrote every department in school I could find who used digital genomes to build them better tools. Tools for understanding the most important language the universe had ever written.

14 years later, in the wake of that realization is the first hackerspace for biotech BioCurious [1], an open source DNA copy machine OpenPCR [2], and lots of great work with the iGEM [3] and DIYbio [4] communities.

These days the fun continues as I'm engineering the biggest living system out there [5], planet Earth.

[1] BioCurious http://biocurious.org

[2] OpenPCR http://openpcr.org

[3] iGEM http://igem.org

[4] Do-it-yourself Biology http://diybio.org

[5] Mining carbon from the air, AirMiners http://airminers.org & Negative http://gonegative.co

Re: I should have loved biology

#257

Post by anm89 » Thu, Nov 19, 2020, 4:29 PM UTC

The thing that drove this home for me were the biovisions animations which got me to go back and basically learn high school biology.

Seeing the mechanical nature of gene transciption and chemical signaling blew my mind.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Hk9jct2ozY&t=170

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQmTKxI4Wn4

On the other hand, I don't buy his thing about wishing his high school teacher had presented it differently. No on else can make you interested in this stuff. The best they can do is provide resources like the ones above.

Re: I should have loved biology

#258

Post by infinite8s » Thu, Nov 19, 2020, 4:33 PM UTC

dekhn wrote: post #248

infinite8s wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it is used a lot in biophysics!

It is? I mean, that was my PhD, but I don't recall anybody ever using AFM for biology. Huh, apparently now they do.

Yeah lots of single molecule studies (strength of an actin filament, how much force needed to 'unfold' various proteins, etc). And this was 20 years ago when I was in grad school. Haven't kept up with the state of the art today.

Re: I should have loved biology

#259

Post by spunker540 » Thu, Nov 19, 2020, 4:46 PM UTC

VoodooJuJu wrote: post #211

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…

I just want to point out that there is no such thing as genetic engineering. This isn't a nitpick, but an important point that investors and laymen alike can benefit from understanding, particularly in regard to avoid being deceived by exuberant claims of progress by so-called "genetic engineering" startups. The top comment [1] from another HN thread sums it up pretty well. Here's an important excerpt: ...engineering…

Genetic engineers sound a lot like machine learning engineers— tweaking huge complicated models which can only be understood through observation/experimentation. Often times the training is stochastic and not directly repeatable too.

Re: I should have loved biology

#260

Post by Melting_Harps » Thu, Nov 19, 2020, 5:00 PM UTC

koeng wrote: post #86

LetThereBeLight wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doing biology, as in culturing cells and performing biochemical assays does not come cheap. Software and wetware development are totally different ball games in terms of upfront costs and risk levels. Just building a wetware proof of concept without university resources is non-trivial in terms of the resources it requires. I don't think biology fits at all in the standard startup model.

It only fits the startup model if you know what you’re doing, which is in pretty short supply. You can definitely create a shockingly good lab for ~3000 though.

> It only fits the startup model if you know what you’re doing, which is in pretty short supply. You can definitely create a shockingly good lab for ~3000 though.

Agreed. Biohacking budgets seldom ever go beyond 10k in my experience, I've spent more than that by the time I was 18 on my car and parts. That's not to say that isn't a lot of money, and mostly discretionary, but its entirely do-able.

So much stuff can be bought second hand now, or you can do what some Biohackers did and go dumpster diving at University campuses for broken or old lab equipment--Josiah did that to start the ODIN before going to NASA.

This requires you either to be in school and know the days they do it, usually after the finals in the Spring on my campus, or pay someone to find out. Either way, its doable: I picked up a microscope and a few cracked magnetic stirring hotplates and a random box of misc glassware and metal stands my Junior year when I swore I was going to turn my living room into a wet-lab once I made enough to buy an old BD flow cytometer after graduation.

Those plans were soon dashed when I realized I could just go to the lab of the The Scripps Research Institute after I did my training there my senior year. I think I just ended up giving it all away on Craigslists as a starter 'Lab kit' years later and it was gone pretty fast.