Comment by jinto36 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jinto36 | Hacker News Reader

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When I read your first sentence my brain was briefly trying to figure out if I had sleep-posted to HN somehow because it sounded so similar to my interests (and there aren't a whole lot of people in the aging+bioinformatics area). I think I might have replied to some of your comments on other articles before but I seem to have lost access to the account I used to use.

Are you working on just Human data right now? I have thought about trying to propose something very close to what you're talking about, but in the environment I'm in right now there's a pretty strong bias against non-hypothesis-driven work, and unfortunately the really big picture multi-omic approach is considered to be too vaguely defined. I wish I could just say "let's collaborate!" and then make it happen so I don't end up trying to duplicate what you're doing but if only the funding model actually supported that sort of cooperation (assuming you're in the US). If you don't mind, what institution/lab are you at now? I'm at University of Rochester, trying to make a co-mentorship arrangement work between a lab that works with C elegans as a model for aging (where the PI has no informatics experience) and a lab that works on computational modeling of biological networks (where the PI has no experience in aging/C elegans) because we don't have a real "bioinformatics" program.

Also if you have any advice on bridging the gap between biologists and computationalists, that's something I have yet to master in my now more than half-decade of experience of trying...

I'm at Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation. My focus has been on human, mainly because that's where the impact is, and because of minor technical issues making it easier to do human data. But we do other species as well, the system is just rougher around the edges for them.

The way we get around the bias for (supposedly) hypothesis-driven work is to get a lot of our funding on collaborative and center grants. We can augment our local aging research work by providing them with context and pretty figures for their papers and grants, and they are happy to send a few $100K our way in exchange. We got a Shock Center award a year or two ago which has accelerated things a lot. A lot of it has been catalyzed by Arlan Richardson and Holly van Remmen, who came here from UT San Antonio.

When it comes to "bridging the gap", yes, it is hard. The key I guess is to be flexible and understand what they want. A lot of them are not looking for grand, informatics-driven hypotheses, but they are ecstatic about extra figures or data they can put into their papers to spice them up. Sometimes I slum it a little and do routine statistical analyses on their experiments just to keep the connections live.

In general, I think it is sensible to try to design systems in such a way they bridge multiple species from C elegans to rodents to humans. If you do one, it's not that hard to do them all, and they all have their place, as C elegans is good for quick testing of lifespan stuff but may or may not generalize, so it is considered helpful if you can use data to give tips about what may or may not translate.

The best brief advice I can give is to figure out what the wet lab people want, and give it to them in a way that maximizes the overlap between what you are doing and what they are doing.

Thanks, the alternative funding approach makes sense. It really doesn't make any sense that everyone wants to utilize the output of large scale science that might not necessarily be hypothesis-driven at the start- but as an individual scientist it's heavily discouraged to start by approaching things that way. I think that's going to have to change, but I have to work within the system for now...

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