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There are at least a few of us on here that are actual biologists- and with the increasing overlap of biotech and hacking, maybe we'll see more of us on here soon? Especially with how much HN seems to enjoy bio related threads, it's nice to see people at least engaging with the subject. And it looks like with time some of the poorer faith comments do get buried, however plentiful they may be.

Yeah there are a few bioinformaticians around - but they're few and far between and are often graduate students or candidates. Contrast with the diversity of tech profiles you find on here, from 60 year old COBOL veterans to ex-Googlers or the creators of frameworks, and all the founders.

I think there's a difficulty in that you can't just do biology from your garage, even bioinformatics. The standards have shifted, and most of the low-hanging fruit has been picked. You either need to generate original data yourself with costly experiments, collaborate with people who have done so, or explore enormous amounts of data with costly compute. To meet these requirements you need to be affiliated to an institution, i.e. work within the system. (An exception would be Googlers and other such people who already have access to the compute for some reason)

Perhaps the whole thing is ripe for disruption, but so far all I've seen is repeated variations on xkcd #1831.

Well, the biohacker movement begs to differ on the garage part, but academic biologists would beg to differ with the biohackers there. I agree that there arent the diversity of opinion that you get in programming here (I'm certainly not amy sort of expert myself, new grad here), but that might come with time. Just having the experience of having studied biology, worked in a lab, written proposals and papers, all go a long way. Imagine we had a biology forum that was a bunch of biologists that barely knew what a computer was discussing the latest media hype around AI. Would be pretty bad. But then even people with just an undergrad or masters level of CS training and some work experience with actual programming could make that discussion a thousand times better, even if they aren't AI experts.

Right now, with all the COVID type articles being posted, it feels a bit like that. I'm not a trained virologist, and I dont know how many trained virologist there are on HN. But a basic perspective on what is the diagnostic test (I've done plenty of QPCR), what is primer design, what are antibody tests, and basic virology like what does it mean to be an rna virus, how is remdesivir supposed to work, etc tends to be missing, and I think k people with my level of experience can provide that. I've studied enough healthcare management to know the terminology at least and be able to discuss a placebo controlled trial versus not, and there are a lot of people with that level of basic knowledge than can contribute. And I've seen those sorts of explanations that are quite good. I've also noticed some pushback from people with at least a basic level of statistical/epidemiological training to the narrative that the risks of COVID are overblown, with discussions of exponential growth and SIR models. There are a few glimpses buried on what can be a pretty large initial onslaught of nonsense of actual biological knowledge. I dont think you need 50 years experience to provide that, though of course that would make the perspectives that much richer and deeper.

> Imagine we had a biology forum that was a bunch of biologists that barely knew what a computer was discussing the latest media hype around AI. Would be pretty bad.

Yea I’m around biotech forums quite a bit and it is just as bad from a technical side. However, people on HN and tech tend to be better at identifying how technology enables things to happens, which is interesting to me.

I mean, I've actually worked in bioinformatics and with biologists who have studied sexual species their entire life and my top-level comment was one of the ones that got buried.

The main thing to learn from this is you can't really talk about this stuff because people don't want certain things to be true. Biologists tended to talk about this stuff openly with me after a few drinks. They dare not speak about it most of the time.

What was your comment?

Lol I've heard so many times about the conspiracy of biologists who are afraid to "tell the truth" about sex differences. Everyone is like Damore, cowing in front of the SJW crowd and afraid to be fired4truth. The reality is much more tame.

The crux of the matter (and potential controversy) is not about sex differences in plants or C. elegans. Most biologists I've met who study algae or polar bears usually limit their expert opinion on those species. It's really about transposing such knowledge to humans, where we don't have that level of bottom-up insight for a variety of reasons ranging from "humans are complicated", "most of what works in other species doesn't work in humans" (see: 99% of drug trials) to "you can't just open up people's brains to see what they're made of".

> "most of what works in other species doesn't work in humans" (see: 99% of drug trials)

Isn't the point of doing animal trials that they are "close enough" for most things to deliver good results? I.e. "if you can't do it in mice, dogs and pigs with your proposed medication, you probably won't be able to do it in humans". They're close enough that xenotransplantation is actively considered. "Humans are so special, everything we learn about anything that isn't human does most likely not apply to humans, so don't you dare even suggest that" just sounds strange to me.

We haven't found anything better to replace animal trials yet, but they aren't close enough to deliver good results.

Animal trials precede the first (Phase I) clinical trials in people.

93% of drugs that make it past animal trials and into Phase I clinical trials fail to make it all the way to final approval:

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/05/09/th...

It's also not clear how many drug candiates we're missing out on because animal models give false positives for toxicity in humans. Compounds that are extremely poisonous to experimental animals may be tolerated much better in humans.

Humans survive exposure to TCDD at levels that would be more than 50 times higher than the lethal dose in guinea pigs:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2,3,7,8-Tetrachlorodibenzodiox...

Acetaminophen is a deadly poison to cats even at modest doses.

It's impractical and unethical to try novel druglike compounds in humans right away, so we may not know how many premature rejections come from animal models until/unless we're able to grow whole human organs for drug testing.

In terms of false positives, the story of Guinea pigs and penicillin comes to mind. IIRC Guinea pigs were more susceptible (might have been that their gut microflora leaned gram positive and that led to toxic effects after penicillin administration? Dont recall exactly off the top of my head).

"It works in a close animal" is a necessary though far from sufficient condition for "it" working in humans. The point of doing animal trials is to filter out drugs that don't even fulfill that condition. Look at the "in mice" twitter account. How many potential Alzheimer treatments and cures for cancer have been touted in the last decade that proved effective in mice? How many of them turned out to be promising in humans? You need to keep that ratio in mind whenever you feel like conjecturing something.

And keep in mind we're talking here about behavioral differences driven by possibly the most complex organ that diverged the most from other animals'.

One thing to consider is that with the alzheimers trials, the mice might be so different that what works in humans might not work in mice. We dont yet have the tools and infrastructure to deal with that hypothetical, though there is some promising work with lab on a chip and brain organoids that could solve that sort of problem of it turns out to be the case

Who said anything about humans? My original comment certainly didn't.

I don't know what you're talking about then. But plenty of comments in this thread did.

I don't think you know what a conspiracy is. People don't speak up precisely because they are alone and don't want to be shunned by the echo chamber. If you've heard about it so many times, why do you think you know best and deny the observations of others?

I also happen to work with biologists and I found no such thing as you describe. People aren't afraid to talk about sex differences. There's no hidden truth that everyone speaks in undertones about and is scared of mouthing out loud. People don't mindlessly transpose what they know about their model organisms to humans. People don't buy into evopsych crap either. (There's a reason evopsych papers have trouble even making it into PNAS.) The community isn't filled with Damores either. So maybe you could clarify what you're talking about because I seem to have lost you there.

> I think there's a difficulty in that you can't just do biology from your garage, even bioinformatics.

Yes. Studying biology is like reverse-engineering extremely complex, constantly changing microscopic systems which developed over thousands of years. Molecular biology in particular is prohibitively expensive. It's just not something people can play with the same way we play with computer programming. A fully equipped laboratory is required to perform even the most basic experiments. Even more resources are required in order to produce original work.

This also causes difficulty in reproducing published results. It's easy to verify that the laws of physics hold true. It's not so easy to reproduce an expensive 10 year long double blind clinical trial.

There is definitely a trend of tech bros 1831'ing biology. While it is very annoying, I do think we should try to be more charitable in how we respond to them. It's ultimately a good thing that other people are interested in what we are doing.

I agree. Maybe I've just gotten jaded from the usual responses I get when trying to talk about biology with tech people (where they just assume it's over their head and want painful analogies to "simplify" it for them) that it's a bit of a breath of fresh air to see people try to engage with it. Even if they're wrong, well, so was I about basically everything when I took bio 101. It's a way to have those assumptions challenged and learn more. If they arent open to it and are operating in bad faith, c'est la vie, peoplle gonna be like that, but if people are approaching fields they dont know in good faith, then it's a first step.

I mean, people being wrong about biology is ok, the issue is when the discussion devolves into some of the touchier subjects and suddenly everyone larps as a scientist. "Do you have citations for that?" "There is a widely accepted consensus that..." "It's not just my opinion, it's science."

This is very strange because in technology threads where actual experts chime in, no one acts like that. People share their experiences about using such-and-such stack, sometimes with very strongly worded and passionate opinions but never with the pretense of scolarship or "quest for truth". Imagine how bewildering it'd be if people cited publications from "The Journal of Serverless Stacks" (IF=1.4) in lieu of experience sharing.

Yes. It takes a lot of time for concepts in biology to sink in and become interconnected mentally. People who are not in the field tend to think about concepts in isolation. Tech people also tend to think more mechanistically/rigidly because they are used to things obeying rules/code.

I agree that it can be annoying when armchair biologists make hollow arguments. But I also do think that we do share some responsibility to not turn people off completely or make them dig in harder in their positions.

What is 1831?

I was referring the XKCD #1831 comic the previous post linked to. https://xkcd.com/1831/

Thanks. The numbers in those URLs didn’t register with me. I like the idea of verbing them!

given my experiences, HN isn't special in the sense that their experience is deep in one area, and shallow in another and therefore have simplified views of the areas of shallow experiences. I volunteer in a local sports league. The number of times I get the "why are my dues so high? where does the money go? you're just lining your pockets!" in 1 season is absolutely ridiculous. But most people never stop to think about the details.

In this case, biology has a bunch of details, many still unknown, and problems look easy until you get into the details.

> HN is notoriously bad at anything related to biology, evolution, and genetics. It's a combination of this (https://xkcd.com/1831/) and this (https://xkcd.com/793/) comic. People there are also fond of finding a bunch of psychology papers that confirms existing biases.

Also https://xkcd.com/55/ and https://xkcd.com/128/

This is the inevitable confusion of a society that insists that nothing exists outside what we can scientifically observe, who rejects concepts of soul and love and still tries to explain their effects using only what they admit. It's like saying we bleed when we're cut because the skin must be producing that blood, denying the existence of veins or a heart.

Good call on those two XKCDs, but I think it's not society that believes that nothing exists outside what we can scientifically observe. Poets, writers and artists don't believe that. Hollywood makes a living out of not believing in that. Most people I meet don't believe that -- sometimes believing in all kinds of nonsense to an extreme I find irritating, but that's my problem :P

In any case, what's specifically irritating is the entrepreneur / startuper / tech bro belief that "we can make an app to solve this", which sometimes also occurs here on HN. No, not every problem can be solved with tech or an app. Even when it can, you Random Startuper are the sidekick of the story, not the main hero who's calling the shots.