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I should have loved biology

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Re: I should have loved biology

#181

Post by _8j50 »

Weird seeing this. I was a natural at biology didn't even have to study and aced any exam to the point where kids would let me cheat on other exams so long as they cheat off of me on biology (not proud if it now but "everybody did it then").

I didn't pursue anything related to it because it just wasn't my personality. I hated hospitals or touching body parts or even talking to random people. And I hated school with a deep passion (still do long after) can't do much with just 4yr degree in biology might as well lock me up in prison in solitary.

Goes to show, you don't need to be natural at something to do well in it and even if you are a natural doesn't mean it's your thing. There are very few things you can't make yourself learn and be good at by compensating for talent with effort and perseverance.

Re: I should have loved biology

#183

Post by Myrmornis »

joshuahedlund wrote: post #160

If I’m an experienced programmer who is fascinated by molecular biology and would love to transition from e-commerce to biotech, what sorts of jobs would I look for or what would I do to prepare for such a switch?

The easiest and fastest and most financially preferable option would probably be to join the software engineering team of a fairly software-oriented biotech company and then, once you're established, let it be known that your personal career advancement aims are to move more in the direction of scientific work. That would be fine at many companies, assuming you can make them think of you as a valuable asset for your software skills.

Re: I should have loved biology

#184

Post by nextos »

Verath wrote: post #15

During the first part of the pandemic I watched the lectures for the Introductory Biology course [1] from MIT OpenCourseWare. I cannot recommend those highly enough! Almost every lecture brought up and highlighted something really cool and fascinating. Like how RNA sequencing over the last couple of years has gone from expensive to almost free, and what its uses are. Or time-lapse of bacteria adapting to antibiotics.…

> [...] where we mostly learned things from outdated books

I can recommend 3 really good books, SICP-level good:

1. Biological Sequence Analysis by Durbin et al.

How to model DNA, RNA and proteins as probabilistic languages / generative models. There is also a companion book with all exercises solved.

2. Physical Biology of the Cell by Phillips et al.

A massive amount of quantitative cell biology models that use simple undergrad physics.

Originated from a Caltech course. After reading this book, all other intro to biology books look like a bag of tricks.

3. An Introduction to Systems Biology: Design Principles of Biological Circuits by Alon.

Bacterial circuits from the perspective of an electrical engineer.

Sadly, NSF discontinued funding for a totally epic Cold Spring Harbor Summer school for postdocs that taught [2,3].

A shame, we need more quantitative biology and less bags of tricks.

Re: I should have loved biology

#185

Post by sh4rks »

intrasight wrote: post #178

I dropped out of tech after a couple years to go study neuroscience. Even though I returned to software, I do not regret for a second that I went to study something so broad and deep and mysterious. I know that huge areas of neuroscience will remain opaque to science for decades to come. I am blessed to have had a few years contact with that complexity and mystery. If anyone reading this, at any age, wants to take bi…

Also to anyone reading this - don't feel compelled to drop out of anything to study something you find interesting. You can very easily find good resources online and do a bit of study everyday.

Re: I should have loved biology

#186

Post by todd8 »

I had been putting off quantum physics and time was running out. I was worried forth semester physics at MIT was going to be tough, but then through some miracle of providence the EE department decided that a solid state chemistry chemistry class plus Into to Biology could be substituted for quantum physics.

Because I had already taken a solid state chemistry class, all I had to do was take a basic introductory biology class; how difficult could that be? It turns out that biology is hard, very hard.

The other students that filled the large lecture hall weren’t ordinary first year students; they were pre-med students. Instead of relaxing by the swimming pool reading a colorful text with pictures of jelly fish and beetles, it felt more like I was taking swim lessons with a few hundred sharks.

The lectures by Professor Luria were great (he had won the Nobel prize four years before) but the number of facts seemed impossible to remember. My fellow students were writing down literally every word written or uttered during each lecture. There wasn’t any mention of jelly fish or bugs or pea plants, but there were complex diagrams depicting even more complex biochemical pathways. I was accustomed to math classes and engineering classes and computer science classes. Biology was very different, more facts and less study of how to apply fundamental principles to prove some theorem or solve some engineering problem.

I survived the Biology class, but it would have been a lot easier for me to take the physics class.

Re: I should have loved biology

#187

Post by ramraj07 »

Balgair wrote: post #110
ramraj07 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard disagree. We understand biology for the most part. The issue is in the exact implementations. An analogy would be like understanding how a computer works. We know how chips are made, the physics behind them. We know how bits are stored and processing steps are executed. We also know generally how operating systems work. We have the full compiled code as assembly instructions. But we don’t have the source code of…

Having done a lot of biology, I'd disagree that we understand biology. My background is neuro, so take that into account. But in neuro, we've nearly no idea about the larger parts of how it all works. Sure, yeah, electrically active neurons, we have that down. But the non electrically active parts? I mean, we're still debating about how much of the brain is glia. Like, we can't even agree on how to count. Don't get m…

Even in your own example, there’s no ambiguity in the fact that glia play a role is not under question. What percentage, IMO, is just a detail. My analogy still stands I think but I suppose that’s open to interpretation.

One question I implore you to ask yourself is how much of this “we don’t fully understand it” attitude comes from indoctrination of that way of thinking that you need to have to write grants and aggrandize your own research topic. As Sydney Brenner said a long time back, (in the context of mol bio) the fundamentals have been discovered, we can let the Americans figure out the details.

Re: I should have loved biology

#188

Post by ramraj07 »

dinvlad wrote: post #147
Balgair wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having done a lot of biology, I'd disagree that we understand biology. My background is neuro, so take that into account. But in neuro, we've nearly no idea about the larger parts of how it all works. Sure, yeah, electrically active neurons, we have that down. But the non electrically active parts? I mean, we're still debating about how much of the brain is glia. Like, we can't even agree on how to count. Don't get m…

I don't even think we understand software, much less biology :-) We can only hope to understand the pieces that are most relevant to the business domain we're trying to solve (like curing a disease or expanding an online business). The complexity of both types of systems is just increasing exponentially over time, so there's little hope (or even need) to understand the whole thing. The challenge is, of course, to und…

There’s a difference between YOU understanding everything vs. ANYONE understanding everything though.

Re: I should have loved biology

#189

Post by adrian_b »

ta988 wrote: post #151
adrian_b wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the living cells spend continuously a lot of energy as long as they are still alive for avoiding the appearance of precipitates inside the cell, e.g. by pumping out of the cells the ions of calcium and sodium and pumping inside the cell the ions of magnesium and potassium, because the former are much more prone to produce precipitates than the latter. This continuous ion pumping is a major component of the energy…

It is a big part of the communication, regulation and sensory system of cells. A lot of receptors are linked to ion channels for example. That's also the reason why there are pumps to bring the ions back on the other side too.

All these functions have appeared much later, most of them only in multicellular living beings, billions of years after the appearance of the living cells, and they have just adapted the already existing ionic pumps to other purposes.

In the beginning, ionic pumps had only 2 purposes, both essential for the survival of any cell, the first was expelling the ions that can form precipitates and the intake of the useful ions that are not dangerous, and the second was the energy interconversion between ionic gradients and forms of chemical energy like ATP hydrolysis/condensation.

Re: I should have loved biology

#190

Post by pdm55 »

The fascinating biology, that is happening right here and now, is to witness COVID evolving to evade the effects of our manufactured vaccines. As quickly as we prime our immune systems with RNA vaccines, coronaviruses, duplicating within human cells, produce a variant in some human, somewhere, that can evade our newly generated antibodies. It's evolution at a bewildering pace.

Is this evolution happening because we have devised means of travelling so quickly? Travellers taking the virus to new populations. The more people infected, the more variants arise? Or is it because vaccinations mean we cull the less-virulent variants of the virus? If we had had no vaccinations, what variants would have evolved, and at what pace?

Why can we eradicate some viruses like polio or smallpox, but, seemingly, not this one? One would have to guess that it's because its means of transmission - through aerosol droplets from sneezes and coughs - is so effective.

Will COVID become as common as the common cold, but forever more deadly?

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