Meet one of the world’s most groundbreaking scientists. He’s 34 | Hacker News Reader

Meet one of the world’s most groundbreaking scientists. He’s 34

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35 pointsadenadel12 comments

I'm all for scientists getting a bit more recognition, though the timing of this with the ongoing court case and the very brief mention of Charpentier and Doudna's work makes it seem a bit suspect.

And even if the law suit ends up favorably for him, it isn't as if he thought up the idea of using CRISPR-Cas for gene editing -- he was just (arguably) the first to get it to work in human cells. It's an impressive achievement, but so is winning a marathon -- somebody has to be the first to cross the finish line. To me at least, a "groundbreaking" scientist is somebody who comes up with something nobody else was even thinking about.

>who comes up with something nobody else was even thinking about

All the "groundbreaking" things I can think of, when I've looked into them, have always had many people working on it, but we rarely know that as a society.

Relativity, quantum mech, lasers, transistors, superconductors, TV, radio, flight, engines galore....

Do you know of any groundbreaking things done "nobody else was even thinking about" it?

Well, a lot of the examples you give deal with technological development, which is different from science as such. For example, as soon as radio was invented, it was obvious that transmitting pictures was the next thing to do, and lots of people went to work on trying to do that. And powered flight was an obvious extension of work on gliders and was likewise very competitive (to the point that some Europeans doubt the Wright brothers' priority to this day).

But groundbreaking science is different. There the next step isn't obvious. While Einstein certainly benefited from the work of previous scientists like Poincaré and Lorentz, it wasn't as if there was a "race" to discover relativity like there was for TV (or CRISPR-Cas in human cells).

>it wasn't as if there was a "race" to discover relativity

Yes, there was. They didn't call it relativity, which is a later name, but probably dozens to hundreds of scientists were working on exactly what Einstein is credited for.

Hilbert was close (published equivalent first?), Poincare was working on it (which is why the symmetries of special relativity are Poincare symmetries), Lorenz was working on it (which is why special relativity focuses on Lorenz transforms) , and many, many people were going to do it within a year or less if Einstein did not do it. There were so many people doing the same thing that there is an entire field devoted to sorting relativity priority out. Einstein is simply the one most people associate with it. See [1] for a huge list of people (and likely not all) that were on the same track at the same time.

And this is also exactly my point. Many things people think were isolated inventions, because history loses most of those who were going to do it at the same time (and often did do it sooner, but just lost credit).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_priority_dispute

Feng Zhang is a cool dude. Cool enough that his name should be in the title.

Scientists agree that Doudna/Charpentier deserve the lion's share of credit for the CRISPR work - if only the Broad institute could agree.

Feng Zhang is a genius. He has done some earth-shattering work.

Like patenting the work of others?

I find it a bit odd that we now consider 34 being young for scientists.

Newton was 23 when he developed the theory of gravitation, Einstein submitted his 4 famous papers at 26.

Conceptually it kind of makes sense. As time progresses and science advances, the amount of knowledge scientists are expected to understand expands. A decent student of science today must know much more than a student in the 17th Century. That extra learning takes time.

Dude might do impressive stuff, but the video provides little insight except that trivial regular expressions are supposed to be applicable to the DNA.

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