Comments by mndoci

The cost of biotech comes from the risk associated with developing a therapeutic and the expense of managing clinical trials. Anyone who does not account for that, and the time it takes to go through regulatory procedures is just misguided. Yes the costs have come down (they always do), but the regulatory burden and risk are not going away anytime soon.

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When I need to focus, I definitely need to use my left ear. Never really gave it any thought before. I just thought my right ear was not exactly doing a good job. Now I feel uncomfortably predictable too

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John

Completely agree. The physics could be improved greatly. Simulations today do tend to stay together, cause you are using explicit waters and better implicit models, but in general there are three challenges; compute power, force fields and programming models. We've got #1 in good shape, and #3 is better than before. #2 we need to work on.

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I believe Friendfeed supports Farsi

http://www.webolobby.com/2009/05/friendfeed-is-now-available...

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It's hard, especially at the molecular level where our knowledge is changing on a near daily basis. I have spent years in the world of structural biology, but know only a little about cell biology.

Having said that, Molecular Biology of the Cell (referred elsewhere) is a great book.

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The site is, for now, a demonstration of how you can use Hadoop and Hive to power a simple data driven website.

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But programming by itself is not knowledge. It's a means to solve problems. It's a very important and critical skill and like any other, it's difficult to become a master, but how are you applying it?

For example, let's say you are trying to solve a problem in crystallography. You need to be a good programmer to come up with a nice refinement algorithm, but without a fundamental understanding of the problem you're trying to solve, you're not going to be able to solve it. The same goes for financial modeling, or some other kind of optimization problem.

In any field you have to keep teaching yourself new skills, since the technologies and approaches change. Even the foundational knowledge changes, but what education helps you get is a core understanding of depth that allows you to adjust. There will always be those who can do it without getting a good education, but those are rare, and in the worlds I've lived in, almost non-existent.

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Yep, I heartily concur. When you get tired of that 23andme stuff, you MUST write a book. Pick any topic. We’ll all be the better for it

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There's a great paper from about a couple of years ago that dives deep into what a gene is and provides historical context. As you'll see, the definition of a genes as being an explanation for heredity is somewhat dated.

http://genome.cshlp.org/content/17/6/669.full

I do like the definition in that article

"The gene is a union of genomic sequences encoding a coherent set of potentially overlapping functional products."

Personally I've always had issues with the idea of patenting basic biology, and genes are fundamental biology of a species, since no one manufactures genomic sequences. How that biology can be controlled, modified and used for all kinds of purposes is a different story.

I would also argue that patents break down completely in modern science, where there is too much complexity for any one organization or people to control what you can do. It hampers science, it hampers innovation, perhaps even to a degree that it's harming human health. This from someone who believes pharma companies should get more control over their patents with the caveat that "me too" drugs should be thrown out once an extended patent period is in place.

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or this one (the utility is questionable, but it's the kind of derived data that makes WA "computational")

http://www91.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=population+of+India*p...

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or this one (the utility is questionable, but it's the kind of derived data that makes WA truly computational)

http://www91.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=population+of+India*p...

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Yeah, that's my main concern as well. That kind of curation just doesn't scale. There's a large body of people out there who can be leveraged, who spend their lives curating and optimizing data sources, especially in chemistry and biology.

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I like how Ars is able to make a complex topic more accessible. MS-based proteomics is still young, and it will take a few years for things to stabilize. RNA expression arrays were in much the same state several years ago. The key is to make sure that the variation comes from the biological samples, and perhaps the instrumentation, with the methods not being a source for those differences. Two things that the field needs to do is (a) make raw data available so that experiments can be reproduced and (b) uses consistent data formats. Standards can/will follow.

One experiment I would like to see is the same lab doing the same experiment multiple times on the same sample on different instruments (of the same make and model). Results should be interesting.

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How does one get from a very narrow discussion of medicine to all medical science? Without questioning the merits of the post (happen to agree with a good chunk of it), that's a sliver of what one might call medical science, albeit a rather lucrative sliver.

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This is not a story about living in a foreign country in the end, but Timo Hannay's talk "The Future is a Foreign Country" is a must read for anyone who has lived in a different country for any length of time. Having lived in three very different countries for significant durations, I can't help but agree.

http://blogs.nature.com/wp/nascent/2008/09/the_future_is_a_f...

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