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Comment by Roritharr | Hacker News Reader

This is such mind-blowing success, it makes me contemplate switching fields. Is it reasonably feasible to switch from IT to Biotech/Medical Research in the mid thirties?

I had a friend with Fukutin-related limb-girdle muscular dystrophy R13 and am wondering if CRISPR could be the solution for her.

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You don't even need to switch fields. There are plenty of biomedical companies (and what isn't a tech company these days?) and projects that could use some passionate technical people.

What are the biomedical FAANGs?

Regeneron, Genetech, Amgen, Vertex, Gilead, Biogen

Where is 10x Genomics in the scheme of things?

They don't make drugs, so more of a pick and shovel play. More like ARM, Segate, WD, Micron?

I've heard of those, but it's interesting to me that you list those and not, say, Illumina.

I mean, they are a pick and shovel play. They don't make drugs? Plus, sequencing is great but it's getting saturated. Plus, ideas like direct sequencing using nanopores and chemical modification of nucleic acid to make the nanopore signal stronger may disrupt.

Reading a lot of 10-Ks, you get the impression that many if not most biotech companies want to appeal to investors who find "pick and shovel" companies appealing. Even companies that are basically drug companies often try to portray themselves as having a revolutionary "platform".

I'm not saying your attitude is obviously wrong, but there must be a lot of people whose imagination is captured by making tools and the potential of that to change the world. The development of a tool like optogenetics, for instance, makes me feel like amazing things can be accomplished. It's leverage.

Yea sure, I love pick and shovel plays. I think they're the ones you make the easy money from like ThermoFisher, Becton Dickinson, EMD/Milipore, Sigma-Aldrich, etc. I was thinking more like FAANG companies that are huge, pay awesome, and make the final product, though I guess you could say advertising is a bit of a pass-through income generator.

Maybe you and I have different definitions of 'platform' company? I define as a way to iterate to get new products, like Regeneron uses their humanized mice to crank-out mAbs, or Genetech/Amgen use recombinant molecular biology to make mAbs, or Vertex uses their in vitro ion channel conductance screening method to make new structure correctors for CFTR...

Anecdotal, but my cousin did exactly this. I will note, he is probably the most exceptional person I known of, beyond those classic geniuses everyone knows.

Interesting, can you give a bit more details what exactly his path was?

comp sci in prestigious european uni. Moved to us in early 2000s. Big nationwide datacenter stuff. Decided to become doctor. Did doctory stuff and floated around medical for a while before switching to psyc. Currently forensic psych for infamous US prison. Found that rather than patient hop in regular psyc practice, or drug up people in asylums, with trial cases spanning years you can really deep dive a person and do good work.

Did he support a family during his transition or was he still single?

Was money a problem in general along the way?

Married no kids, partner also successful. Given his talents and character I don't believe money was an issue.

I think you need to pause before considering this route. Are you that exceptional? This level of intelligence is incredibly rare and unless you're 100% sure you're capable of this, I wouldn't do it.

The guy has brains to burn of course, but tbh, it's simply about motivation. Medicine is a grind, more than an intellectual exercise. If you have the brains for actual tech there's no doubt you have the requisite intelligence. The only barrier is the stamina for the grind. I know I couldn't do it. Not as I am now. Maybe in the future. I couldn't say for sure, given I'm not clairvoyant.

I agree that you should give serious pause. Probably the most serious pause of your life, but still. I wouldn't shy away too quickly. When you know, you know.

Very true. Not to discount MD training or doctors, but it's less about connecting disparate dots or learning how to solve problems and more about working out the brain like a muscle.

It’s worth knowing there are very few diseases that can be cured with singular gene edits. Many diseases involve multiple genes, cascades of gene expression, or complex physiological pathways. Oh, and not to mention epigenetics and environmental factors.

The strategy they used speaks exactly to your point. The diseases were not "cured" in the sense that these people were brought back to a generic baseline. That very well may have required a complex series of edits that are well beyond what is currently possible. Instead, they focused on a clever workaround that was simpler to implement, reactivating fetal hemoglobin. That's how they were able to cure two different diseases with the same gene edit.

So you have a much larger pool of genetic and non-genetic diseases that can be cured now. For example if someone had low lung function due to lung scarring, this might be an interesting treatment to look at.

My family has one of the well-known single-site cancer-causing mutations; we know what the specific site is, even. It would be immense to "fix" (I am not a geneticist) that single site. Even just for my kids.

Why would you prefer the risks of editing versus the risks of preimplantation screening? Editing would be strictly riskier unless there’s really no alternative (unlikely but possible)

Preimplantation screening isn't an option for me or any other of my family members who are long past implantation. I'm not saying I'd hop on stage 1 clinical trials of a potential editing cure, and we'd have to see what the data on risk looked like to compare it with the risk from cancer without editing.

Actually, there is a couple thousand monogenic Mendelian diseases, so work isn't short, also not people, just money. However, you won't treat a developmental delay with a gene edit, that only works for non-working enzymes etc. without too much permanent damage.

Anyone knows how to get into the field?

As an other commenter wrote, if you know some software engineering, you are already valuable to all biotech companies, so it's probably better to go there as an engineer first and pick up the biology on the side than to go back to school and waste 5 years of your life without providing real value.

Bioinformatics is probably a good option too.

Go for it. We'll probably still be looking for a vaccine for corona by the time you graduate!

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