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I'm choosing euthanasia etd 1pm. I have no last words.

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Re: I'm choosing euthanasia etd 1pm. I have no last words.

#301

Post by scottlegrand2 »

duaneb wrote: post #260
gknoy wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think of the scientific advancements we might have made had people like Einstein or Fermi or Tesla been able to live another fifty or hundred years, or were still alive. If we ever manage to find a way off-planet, being able to live for half a millenium (or "forever", or until-I-decide) sounds AMAZING. It does sound like quite the economic problem, though, and would certainly make earthbound resources more troublesom…

It's one of those things that's great until you realize that as resource constrained people in a capitalist society we will basically poor our scientific advancement into the preservation of the wealthiest. Or birth control: cue the monkey house.

We're not remotely resource-constrained IMO. And the universe doesn't become a zero-sum game for a very very long time, if ever. We are, however, severely imagination constrained IMO and that's more than enough to suck all the fun out of existence at times.

Re: I'm choosing euthanasia etd 1pm. I have no last words.

#302

Post by escot »

ianai wrote: post #179
escot wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an immense amount of software work to be done in biotech. Molecular biology research is in need of better automation, analysis, visualization techniques, and on and on. We need folks at all levels. I entered biotech as a web developer and have been able to pick more challenging problems to approach on a monthly basis. We know next to nothing about the human body. Im optimistic that tech will help out us on a…

How did you enter it? I'd love to feel I was helping something meaningful with work.

I joined my current company, Transcriptic, which is a biotech startup heavy on software. We are a "lab in the cloud". I just made the decision that I wanted to be in biotech so I looked for the most interesting startup I could find. Zero bio background, all software (web, mostly front end, lots of data viz). I now get to work across the stack, including robotics, and more importantly there is a whole green field of interesting problems to solve.

Re: I'm choosing euthanasia etd 1pm. I have no last words.

#303

Post by escot »

existencebox wrote: post #255
escot wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an immense amount of software work to be done in biotech. Molecular biology research is in need of better automation, analysis, visualization techniques, and on and on. We need folks at all levels. I entered biotech as a web developer and have been able to pick more challenging problems to approach on a monthly basis. We know next to nothing about the human body. Im optimistic that tech will help out us on a…

I'd echo sister posts re: how to get involved. My wife is currently in biotech doing mixed research/slightly CS-ey work and it constantly boggles my mind how antique many of their methods are, but they barely have money to keep running let alone pay for the expertise and/or infrastructure to leverage modern computing. Companies that have more freedom tend to be more restrictive I've found, and without a PHD it can be…

Yes there's tons of low hanging fruit, you just have to get your foot in the door somewhere to get eyes on them. A lot of biology is fairly rudimentary processes. It's like baking a cake. Much of medicinal chemistry is just exploring a space of molecules and screening them to find one that does X. And of course software is very good at modeling simple processes.

As I mentioned in another comment, I actively decided to seek out a company in the space to join. I didn't know anyone really in bio before that. Another option is to get involved with an academic lab that is trying to bring software into their work (and there are many). Below are some interesting folks /projects merging bio and code (disclosure: I work for Transcriptic):

Using nothing but code to engineer proteins. blog.booleanbiotech.com/genetic_engineering_pipeline_python.html

Autoprotocol -- JSON specification for defining biological protocols autoprotocol.org

Using visual programming to describe bio protocols http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/10/14/081075

Engineering bacteria with code and automation. www.zymergen.com

Re: I'm choosing euthanasia etd 1pm. I have no last words.

#304

Post by escot »

rubicon33 wrote: post #182
escot wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an immense amount of software work to be done in biotech. Molecular biology research is in need of better automation, analysis, visualization techniques, and on and on. We need folks at all levels. I entered biotech as a web developer and have been able to pick more challenging problems to approach on a monthly basis. We know next to nothing about the human body. Im optimistic that tech will help out us on a…

How would one get started in Biotech?

Please take a look at my replies above :)

Re: I'm choosing euthanasia etd 1pm. I have no last words.

#305

Post by escot »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #239
escot wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an immense amount of software work to be done in biotech. Molecular biology research is in need of better automation, analysis, visualization techniques, and on and on. We need folks at all levels. I entered biotech as a web developer and have been able to pick more challenging problems to approach on a monthly basis. We know next to nothing about the human body. Im optimistic that tech will help out us on a…

My background is distributed computing/grid computing. How can I contribute?

Genomics (as a sister comment mentioned)

Medicinal chemistry and high throughput screening is (becoming) a data science.

Workcells (search for "automated biology workcell"

Re: I'm choosing euthanasia etd 1pm. I have no last words.

#306

Post by escot »

heuermh wrote: post #271
toomuchtodo wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My background is distributed computing/grid computing. How can I contribute?

At the UC Berkeley AMPLab we're working on scaling genomics [0], all open source under Apache 2 license. Or more generally, any of the Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF)[1] projects could use a hand, open source licenses vary. [0] - https://github.com/bigdatagenomics/adam [1] - https://www.open-bio.org/wiki/Main_Page

Oh very cool.
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