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I should have loved biology

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Re: I should have loved biology

#201

Post by keeptrying »

I have always wanted to learn medicine slowly - over years. So I read medical text books slowly over years.

I find it amazing that we give so much agency to doctors over our health while we know relatively very little about our own bodies and health.

And biology is a big part of that learning.

I now study medical books on my soare time.

Would recommend “Clinical Methods” as your first foray. You will understand your doctor and the biology is immediately applicable in your Daily life. Ie how to deal with fevers in your kids.

After that learn about your skeletal system and biomechanics.

Next Neuro degenerative disease and the brain.

Once you’ve caught the learning bug, you can go into 1st year Med School curricula and then the rest from there.

Some big parts of medicine is relatively useless - psychology for example.

Would recommend learning meditation ina real way and reading “Right Concentration.”. Learning about jhanas and mental states.

I remember as a kid when they asked me what I wanted to do, I never understood why I couldn’t do all of the above.

Re: I should have loved biology

#202

Post by SturgeonsLaw »

todd8 wrote: post #186

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 biolo…

Biology classes kinda get easier in the later years (at least they did for me), because although they start of with a lot of "don't worry about why this happens, just know that it happens", we got to the "this is why it happens", and it all starts to fall into place. There are some fundamental principles, so far as we actually know them, in biology, however it does seem to be taught in a broad-to-narrow direction that imo does a disservice to those wanting to really understand the mechanisms.

Re: I should have loved biology

#203

Post by smokey_circles »

keeptrying wrote: post #201

I have always wanted to learn medicine slowly - over years. So I read medical text books slowly over years. I find it amazing that we give so much agency to doctors over our health while we know relatively very little about our own bodies and health. And biology is a big part of that learning. I now study medical books on my soare time. Would recommend “Clinical Methods” as your first foray. You will understand your…

> psychology for example

while I'm pretty despondent with the replication crisis in psychology, medicine isn't much better.

but to dismiss it outright is pretty ignorant. curious how you explain the state of America if your assertion is psychology and mental health are "relatively useless" fields

Re: I should have loved biology

#204

Post by nkrisc »

bognition wrote: post #8

There is a large gap between the mechanisms of chemistry and the magic of biology that most people do not see closed until late in their education. It's a real shame that this gap cannot be closed sooner. In undergrad I took a bunch of biology and chemistry classes. It wasn't until I took Biochemistry (a senior level class) that everything came together. The biochemistry class I took was a re-telling of all the stori…

> Imagine trying to reverse engineer a distributed system with tens of thousands of interconnected services and messaging queues that all just sort of evolved and were not built with clean engineering practices.

Bit by tiny bit, and painstakingly slowly.

Re: I should have loved biology

#206

Post by henshao »

AinderS wrote: post #155
azalemeth wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other word missing is "cheap". Proteins are under a massive selection pressure: many thermodynamic reactions in fundamental bits of biology are as thermodynamically efficient as they can be, else some slightly more efficient mutant would have out-competed it aeons ago. I became interested in biology as a physicist when I realised that all of the problems, on some level, boil down to putting a load of lego pieces…

> It's why I work at the intersection of the two fields. Sounds fascinating. May I ask which field that is/what type of work you do?

Associate professor of medical physics & molecular imaging

In their profile

Re: I should have loved biology

#207

Post by greymalik »

nextos wrote: post #184
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 simp…

What are the prerequisites to handling these books? Would they be good for someone who never took Bio in college or even AP Bio in high school? Or would some remedial work be needed first?

Re: I should have loved biology

#208

Post by april_22 »

todd8 wrote: post #186

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 biolo…

The amount of things you need to learn in biology is truly hard, though from what I've heard, there's nothing harder than quantum physics, since it's so fundamentally different from how we're used to seeing things.

Re: I should have loved biology

#209

Post by watwut »

synergy20 wrote: post #80
Pulcinella wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money, power, control. Defund schools and create horrible working and learning conditions for those who stay. Create a problem and then say you are the only one who knows how to fix it. Prey on peoples’s fear, especially fear for their children. Sow mistrust and bigotry in their communities. Unfortunately far, far too many in power who actively and intentionally do not have the best interests of students at heart. “T…

On top of that, there is the "education first" mindset. When a culture puts education first(e.g Eastern Asia countries), it not only means they will sacrifice their limited resources for education, it also means teachers are well respected and well paid across the society, relatively speaking. Further, when a country focuses on CRT and LGBT+-education and Equity-grading at K-12 these days, school is no longer a place…

Schools dont focus on CRT and I guarantee you that the kids are not loosing anything by LGBT not being taboo anymore.

If anything, schools and educations are harmed by scaremongering and mythmaking like you do.

Re: I should have loved biology

#210

Post by nextos »

greymalik wrote: post #207
nextos wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [...] 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 simp…

What are the prerequisites to handling these books? Would they be good for someone who never took Bio in college or even AP Bio in high school? Or would some remedial work be needed first?

They are self-contained. [1] discusses very little biology, it is mostly about biological sequences as formal languages. [2] is meant as an introduction to biology. [3] is self-contained, but to appreciate its content probably it would help to skim through Molecular Biology of the Gene by Watson et al.
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