No PhDs needed: how citizen science is transforming research | Hacker News Reader

No PhDs needed: how citizen science is transforming research

nature.com

20 pointsbcOpus8 comments

With the advent of MOOCs, I’m been taking lots of science courses to get a basic foundation in science. I would love to do research without getting my Phd and work on interesting projects.

I still have a lot to learn and read but it seems organic chemical experiments are really expensive and lots, lots of trial and error is needed. From the drug discovery course I took, robots are used to create millions of compounds to look for potential hits and then even more trial and error is needed as your progress through the subsequent steps. Also these big drug companies seem to have lots of unshared proprietary data that greatly helps them reduce the amount of experimentation that is needed to find potential drug candidates.

Unlike programming , the equipment chemicAl compounds, animal models all seem to be very expensive.

I would love to create a potential drug, patent it but it just doesn’t seem feasible unless you work for a biotech company :(

could you give a list of the MOOCs you have taken, or at least a list of your favorites? i am interested in hearing about them.

Sure I haven’t taken too many yet but I took general chemistry and organic chemistry on youtube.

For Moocs:

I recommended intro to bio by mit (great intro to how biochemistry and genetics joined together to become the field of biotech as we know it today) as well as medicinal chemistry in edX.

https://www.edx.org/course/medicinal-chemistry-the-molecular...

https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/biology/7-012-introduction-to-bi...

There are more and more biology related MOOCs popping up frequently.

If you are interested, there’s lots of computational work to do in chemistry and applications. It might be hard to break into without going to graduate school, but there are many free high quality software available.

For chemistry with localized molecules, a potential software to look up might be Orca.

For physics and bulk materials, I am a fan of Quantum Espresso.

You probably won’t discover a new drug (whether you do computation or experiments), but computation can give an understanding about how existing drugs work and/or how they can be synthesized.

Yes! I thought parent wanted to get into experimental science but this is also a viable approach. There is a lot of data to be mined in biology and chemistry and a dearth of people making good models.

I did drug discovery in grad school -- finding leads is generally not something suitable for small labs, but studying them is. A big source of compounds that actually work isn't high-throughput screening, it's isolating the active ingredient of plants and fungal matter that has the desired properties in nature, which is something that can in theory be done in a home lab (cultivating eukaryotic cells is difficult compared to bacteria but there are protocols and cell lines that aren't too expensive). This was how pretty much all science was done before molecular biology was a thing, and it gave us very useful compounds, including penicillin. (For the sake of the poor critters, please don't do animal research if you have never worked with lab animals before).

Most of figuring out which drugs are promising is biochemistry (and clinical trials) not so much organic chemistry. I wouldn't say organic chemistry is super inaccessible (given people with 0 education seem to be able to pop up kitchen counter meth labs in no time), but doing it with a purpose that isn't "follow this recipe" is difficult because a lot of stuff that looks like it should be biologically active doesn't actually make it into the cell in the first place. But I may be biased and I'm sure there are organic chemists around that have an idea of how amateurs could go around doing some small science in that area.

Thanks for the reply! Sorry for the confusion : I should have stated biochemistry.

I went through this course (below)which was really interesting. However the course focused more on synthetic Chemistry and only briefly touched upon how active compounds are found and extracted from natural compounds.

I also read about biotechnology and went through some lecturers on YouTube and MIT intro to bio course. The impression I get is biotech (recombinant DNA) is cheaper than drug discovery? Drug discovery seems to have a lot more factors you need to be concerned about (clearance rate, bioavaibilty, binding to too many proteins )that make seem more expensive

https://www.edx.org/course/medicinal-chemistry-the-molecular...

Would you mind recommending couple of books so I could gain some more knowledge on the subject.

I just purchase “organic chemistry or drug design and drug action”

Is there a comprehensive list of citizen science initiatives anywhere?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com