31–40 of 84 posts
Really glad to see this, but it reminds me of the earlier HN post that said engineers don't go into genomics because it doesn't pay and requires a lot of investment in learning biology.
Then there are also engineers from XKCD 1831 https://xkcd.com/1831
https://www.biostarhandbook.com/
I have learned so much from it.
It is an introduction into what is like to do genomics in a scientific environment. The content at the link the OP posted appears to be an oversimplified, high level and naive overview
And yeah it shows - contrived example after another, and honestly not a great description of anything.
If you want to truly understand genomics you have to understand how biology works. And honestly it’s great info for anyone even if you’re not getting into genomics or whatever.. why would you not want a working model of how life is put together? In that case I’d just recommend dusting off a biochem or cell bio text book and reading just the first 5-8 chapters. Typically they lay it out very simply from basic principles and the authors have far more experience and understanding and writing help than this weird tutorial course thing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of my gateways into Making was during grad school when my housemate brewed beer. He wanted to make a counterflow wort chiller, went to Home Depot, bought some parts, assembled the whole thing, and it worked perfectly. I was completely blown away you could make "scientific" apparatus from Home Depot. And immensely jealous.
What kind of materials are food grade there? Sound like a fun project
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The people studying yeast metabolism in grad school were always the ones with the best beer (especially the ones that created mutant strains). I think the two might be related.
One of my gateways into Making was during grad school when my housemate brewed beer. He wanted to make a counterflow wort chiller, went to Home Depot, bought some parts, assembled the whole thing, and it worked perfectly. I was completely blown away you could make "scientific" apparatus from Home Depot. And immensely jealous.
A quick trip to Lowe’s to get PVC fittings and pipes, and I suddenly made my own scientific equipment and saved me some time!
I have absolutely loved working in genomics. I am a huge believer that genomics will be a huge part of healthcare in the future, and i have two examples to motivate that point that I think may be interesting to the reader. 1) The Moderna vaccine was made with the help of illumina genome sequencing. They were able to sequence the virus and send that sequence of nucleotides over to moderna for them to develop the vacci…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of my gateways into Making was during grad school when my housemate brewed beer. He wanted to make a counterflow wort chiller, went to Home Depot, bought some parts, assembled the whole thing, and it worked perfectly. I was completely blown away you could make "scientific" apparatus from Home Depot. And immensely jealous.
What kind of materials are food grade there? Sound like a fun project
I got a real imposter syndrome from the whole project and my housemate went on to be a famous microscopist (but later rage-quit to leave for industry). I build microscopes using 3d printers and other easily sourced bits. But Home Depot is a terrible place to source materials. They are the lowest quality.
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I have a similar story with chemistry. I’d also like to get back into the sciences, but I’m not sure how relevant programmers are.
Very relevant and becoming moreso. Check out job postings at research institutes and universities with healthy research departments
I didn't get this from skimming the first page - but what will this let me do? If I take this course will I be able to mess with a cell or will I just learn some stuff about biology. I saw a recent Lex Friedman podcast where the guest talks about "bioelectric patterns" and somehow getting a worm to grow a second head by messing with those patterns. I would absolutely start on this course now if it was a realistic pat…
This is the worst outcome of regulation of the life sciences. There is no REPL for the cell. No tinkering allowed. When Marvin Minsky was growing up in New York, neighborhood pharmacists owned fluoroscopes. He said those fluoroscopes were like “great black boxes” to him and that “those kinds of black boxes don't exist for kids anymore.”
Unfortunately, each step ends up being extremely challenging, and there's tons of noise, and the cost of each Read, Eval and Print is far higher than in a programming language. Further, the "system" is running 38,000 other "threads" all of which have direct read and write access to your data, some of those threads consider your data to be the enemy and cut it up, while others are just randomly spamming your console with uneccessary debug log messages.
We have actually reached the point where some scientists have synthetically created a novel chromosome, and used a preexisting cell to bootstrap the new genome so that the cell eventually contains only protein from the new genome. To me, that represents a step beyond tinkering: it means we can create synthetic lifeforms with exactly and only the details we want, which makes studying them and engineering them far easier.
Interestingly, even though this tech exists, nobody has found any interesting use for it and it's not even really used to probe biology.
A better example would be gene therapy, which has been developing slowly over decades. A single person died in the a trial in the 90s and stopped development (that's the regulation part you're referring to) for decades. In other trials that don't include gene therapy, patients routinely die and they're just a statistic.
Really glad to see this, but it reminds me of the earlier HN post that said engineers don't go into genomics because it doesn't pay and requires a lot of investment in learning biology.
If you want some personal motivation to get into genomics, you can get your whole genome sequenced for a few hundred bucks and play around with the raw files yourself. I used Dante Labs[1] and they are great. You can even ask them to delete your data and samples! [1] – https://dantelabs.com/
at best you waste your time, at worst you will find all kinds of things that are not there
it is the Silicon Valley hacker mentality that thinks the life is some sort of computer where you can fiddle with parameters
learn some biology first, then you can marvel at it and realize just how absurdly simplistic is to think you can read anything out of some random letter