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I hear ya. I've been a programmer for over a decade and even though I'm making great money and it's intellectually stimulating, I'm essentially giving it all up and diving into biotech (studying now for an M.S. in Bio).

The headwinds are persistent: credentialism and a glut of PhDs that are way more qualified than me. I'm constantly meeting bio people going the other way - into tech.

Despite that, I'm stubbornly going to keep going because like you say, the potential of Biotech to reduce human suffering seems so much greater.

I worry about becoming pigeonholed by my background, or falling into the many pitfalls you point out like screwed up incentives or narrow funding paths. More than anything, I want to work on something important and meaningful, like a disease.

Roughly speaking, my current idea is to learn the basics which I'm in the process of doing now [1], get basic credentials, and then find data on causes of suffering, take the first derivative, sort descending, and go. I know it's naive, but it seems like the right thing to do.

[1] https://freeradical13.github.io/

Making advancements in cancer treatment has to be several orders of magnitude more difficult than coding an app. Your point sounds a lot like a relative privation fallacy. That is, if the problem you are solving is not the worst problem then it's not important. If you were to found a successful startup, you could fund research that is important to you. I think the fat cats hoarding cash instead of investing in projects that will further humanity should be the ones who feel guilty, not you.

You actually make his point stronger: Given the difficulty, there are far too few people in it. Instead, people flock to the easy stuff. That's because who pays you if you don't get results within a few years at most? Which is hard for hard problems with no known solutions.

Basic research with no concrete plannable payoff is not exactly what private business is good at. Food for thought, Silicon Valley is based on unlimited debt-based government R&D spending during WWII, private investors only came later to an already fertile field that had lots of very concrete results to show: https://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xo

I can't run a biotech lab in my basement and I'm not interested in looking for funding so I have to run someone else's company.

So no, I don't feel guilty for anything. And despite the general feeling, not everyone in here is trying to build the next Facebook. We're just ordinary guys trying to make a (comfortable) living.

Last but not least, you make it sound like a smartass hacker could discover the cure for cancer or Alzheimer. It's not that easy. If pharmaceutical companies with decades of considerable funding and teams of hundreds of highly specialized scientists haven't figured it out what makes you think that we could? We're smart, sure, but not that smart.

"We're just ordinary guys" And ladies, etc.

I've seen several comments of this ilk today nitpicking the comments of other people on the detail of gendered language. I find them super tiresome and my feeling is they are probably counterproductive. Unless, you know, your real goal is to aggravate everyone and alienate them such that people start wishing women would just go back to being barefoot and pregnant.

"I wasn't racist until you made me racist by calling me a racist," says every trump supporter, and also it's total fiction.

A lot of people I know who worked in bio quit and went into tech, not because they couldn't get a job, but because they found bio research to be unbearably tedious.

Perhaps the real market opportunity is in facilitating this kind of research, rather than just digging another mine.

Oh it is, it soooo is.

> No sane investor is going to put money into R&D that will end up failing 9/10 times.

Do you know what website you are on? It’s closer to 9.5, I think.

But they invest in businesses that each have a plan that you know has a chance to work. Big difference between investing into the completely unknown. Besides, his 9/10 is way too optimistic. For basic research it is more like zero chance of profit because - it's just basic research to understand the problem and play around. More like particle research using expensive accelerators, not research on how can we use lasers to accomplish xyz (now that we already have them and know their physics exactly).

Investors that invested into yet another Linux startup in the dot com boom had a high chance of failure - but those business all tried to be RedHat, not something completely unknown. And the subject of the business was an operating system, not something unknown. Your bet is on execution and the market, not on some yet unknown product.

http://carbon.ycombinator.com/

> It's time to invest and avidly pursue a new wave of technological solutions to this problem - including those that are risky, unproven, even unlikely to work.

I don’t think you’ve really thought this argument through.

Quoting a self-proclaimed mission statement as "proof" of anything, really?

And no, you did not think this through, or you are just grossly uninformed.

Example: https://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xo

Private business only takes paths that are already visible. No investor spends money on the truly unknown.

You can downvote all you want as the small person you show yourself to be through it, facts will still remain facts not open to voting.

Please don't break the site guidelines even though someone else did. Users need to follow the rules here even when provoked.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: unfortunately it looks like you've frequently been uncivil in HN comments. We ban accounts that do that, so can you please review the guidelines and not do that anymore?

Could you please tell me what exactly is "uncivil" in my comment?

Oh and by he way, I could not care less about some stupid "ban". First, it's not like I need anything from you or this site, second, I don't think it works. Not that I would have any reason to try to create new accounts, because seriously, who cares, I just find it frustratingly silly - STUPID - that you threaten me with a ban.

Furthermore, I don't agree that I was uncivil, not now, not in the past.

Insults, accusations and a strident tone. Those are uncivil. In case you didn't know what that word means. See, I can do it too!

Can you please not resort to personal swipes? They degrade this place and evoke worse from others.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I moved to programming from biomedical R&D. It wasn't a decision based on economic concerns. I don't actually agree that "we could be further along in biotech if there were already a good number of us working on it", there are a bunch of people working on it and they are very intelligent, but the way projects are managed, communicated and evaluated is not conducive to great and immediate impact and doing research on humans actually has some issues.

Am very interested in talking about the field w/ pretty much anyone though. It has remained quite near to my heart.

25% of people die from cancer. There's big money in finding an effective treatment.

My limited experience in this suggests that the main issue is that techies and biologists don't make friends that often and even when do, they they both tend to glaze out when the other tries to talk shop. One wants to talk about algorithms (the techies) and one wants to talk about classification (the bio people). And we haven't even gotten to the topic of conversation yet.

Another major problem is that medical schools don't require serious math. I genuinely believe the single best way to advance health care would be to make linear algebra a pre-requisite for medical school.

Genuinely curious, how would learning linear algebra help future medical doctors?

They don't understand how to think in higher dimensions, or how that quickly separates the trivial from the near-impossible. Many don't understand deeper algorithmic thinking. Recursion, partial differential equations.

They gather enough information that they can classify a patient into a storyline and they follow that storyline. If someone adds a new complication to the storyline, they adopt that. If the patient lives, they are happy. If the patient dies, they are sad.

Trying to explain to them that we have, today, the tools to concretely rethink all the data about cancer or infectious disease, or inflammatory conditions, or all the above, in innumerable ways, simply escapes them.

You can tell them you're funded and have petabytes of data and they just smile and nod and say "Oh, well, start with something small and build up."

I say this as a board-certified specialist. My colleagues drive me nuts. And the more powerful (read, "senior") they are, the less they understand.

There are many different kinds of cancer. It's very unlikely to find a treatment for all of them.

If cancer were suddenly cured, those people would still die

What's the percentage of non-EOL people that die of cancer?

I don't know, but I've personally known quite a few people who died of cancer decades before their 80's, and only one in his 80's.

They might die in a nicer way. Dying of cancer is not very pleasant compared to falling off a horse when you're 143 and breaking your neck.

I'm assuming 75% of people aren't dying in that way (or aged 98 while making love to their fourteenth wife and losing control of the plane they're flying)

I'm personally more worried about things like dementia

Sure, I'd also rather die from cancer than from Alzheimer's, but "they'll die in a different way" is a poor argument against medical research.

But it's an argument about where to target medical research. In the UK dementia gets 6 times less funding than cancer (88m vs 540m), despite costing over twice as much to treat [0]. Global statistics seem tricky to find.

[0] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/news/11532982/Dement...

"Getting funding" from government sources is an entirely different game than getting funding from private sources. The former is about politics, and the latter is about making money, and what the funding is for can therefore be entirely different.

There's more money to be made from researching into baldness than curing cancer or dementia. That funding is from government and charity sources combined.

(Long term treatments of course is another thing - that's why we have expensive daily tablets for malaria, but no vaccine. More profitable to charge $1/day than charge $50 for a one-off vaccine)

Pfizer have pulled out of neuroscience research completely, Saracatinib (from AstraZeneca) was a failed cancer drug before someone thought "hey lets try this on dementia"

https://xkcd.com/1831/

You mention that "we could be way further along in biotech if..." What do you consider this to mean, and more importantly - why?

We live at a time when many believe that if there was just enough money and work going into we could eliminate all ailments and be living to 200, if not outright headed towards a Kurzweilian future - which is seemingly radically more far off as the years pass. But I can't help but consider that this optimism is happening at the same time that we can't manage to cure the common cold. And many of the most revolutionary steps we've had in medicine happened many decades and most often by purely serendipitous happening -- and not directed and heavily funded research.

For instance chemotherapy is still the front line treatment for cancer and its discovery came when a couple of doctors noticed that victims of mustard gas in the first World War had surprisingly low immune cell counts. As another example penicillin, the first and father of all antibiotics, was also discovered completely by accident. A scientist accidentally left a petri dish containing some bacteria open. It had been contaminated by some mold from a nearby window, but that mold seemed to have inhibited the bacterial expansion. Lo and behold, antibiotics emerge as a byproduct of mold on rotting decay. It took years for that discovery to be accepted even after the discovery had published and spoken about as much as he could. Probably because it's defies all intuition and is certainly not a path anybody would have ever intentionally gone down, except with hindsight. Vaccines? Similar story. Hey I noticed all these milk maids, that have caught cow pox before, are immune to small pox for some reason. Do other people become immune if exposed to cow pox? Cool, they do!

By contrast, medical progress in recent decades has been extremely asymptotic. Perhaps this could be because we've only spent $x trillion instead of $x+$y trillion, but it could also mean that we are simply hitting a genuine asymptote where we'll continue to be able to make progress but will see ever smaller returns. The current era of extreme optimism is also hardly new. A couple of decades ago nanotechnology was going to be an imminent breakthrough that would cure practically anything, and even revolutionize matter itself. And genetic engineering has been creating promises since its advent. In the decades of promises there the most we really ended up with was some crops genetically engineered to resist an herbicide, which invasive herbs also naturally grew rapidly resistant to. Cas9? We can wait a few years, but I strongly suspect I'll be able to add it onto the nanotechnology pile of 'just around the corner' revolutionary breakthroughs, but they're just around the corner in the same way that the end of MC Escher's stairwells are also just around the corner.