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Comment by karimf | Hacker News Reader

Whenever I tell someone I was competing for International Biology Olympiad, they were always saying, "Uh I hate biology, it is just memorizing names." Yes, biology exam in school is just memorizing, but it's a totally different beast for the international competition.

You still need to know basic biology, but more often than not, the solution is in the problem. It's more of reading graph, recognizing pattern, and inferring conclusion based on the data provided.

I only reached national level because my lab skill was garbage, but still, fun times.

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That reminds me (tangentially) of this piece I read a while back: https://jsomers.net/i-should-have-loved-biology/

I felt mostly neutral about biology back in high school (mostly due to the fact that I didn't find it that much to remember, so it was hardly a struggle, but the teaching was less than awe-inspiring to be diplomatic). When I read the piece above, I mostly thought it was well written and matched how school had killed a lot of curiosity for me about many a topic.

Then I recently started reading up on molecular biology basics after stumbling across a bunch of youtube videos, and I have to say I don't think I've ever been this thoroughly, viscerally fascinated by anything I've learned about. Much of what I'd read or studied so far was either "here's a neat model that explains a lot of things concisely", or "here's a way practical problems like x, y, and z can be solved". With the foundational mechanisms of biology, on the other hand, it was like suddenly opening my eyes to incredible levels of complexity all around and inside me I had completely neglected before.

Any resources that you find particularly great?

What got me started was probably this from "The Thought Emporium", and other videos on his channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3FcbFqSoQY (obvious don't try this at home disclaimer).

What I'm reading right now is "Molecular Biology of the Cell" — it's a dense textbook and I'm taking my time, so only about two chapters in, but I love how it focuses on a lot of fundamental principles and occasionally points out astonishing facts.

There's also this series which might be a nice, casual primer: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3EED4C1D684D3ADF

James Somers also lists some other books in his post I linked to above, might be worth checking out.

I second the recommendation for "Molecular Biology of the Cell" if you want to know how cells work, which is a pretty interesting and important subject. One thing I like about this book is that it's clear about what we don't know, and there is a lot. (It's interesting to read books from before a discovery (e.g. geology books before continental drift) and see if they acknowledge something is unknown or if they confidently give the wrong answer.)

Checkout the MIT class: Biology Secret of Life by Eric Lander, who is a mathematician turned geneticist who led the Human Genome Project. He teaches in an axiomatic way, which I think many here would appreciate.

I found the teaching to be way better than any high school class, which is the biology background for most people.

https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-to-biology-the-secre...

Wow, I need to check that out, thanks!

I find it interesting - for me, the existence of an olympiad for a subject is a kind of immediate proof that there's plenty of room for a particular kind of problem-solving in it (which you don't necessarily get ready-to-hand in all fields of knowledge/research).

May I ask, can you say something more? I'm interested in how that would have looked like.

After reading the problems again, well, I might have to take my words back. When I said basic biology, it's not high-school biology, but college-level biology. There are five main topics: molecular cell biology, anatomy and physiology of animals, anatomy and physiology of plants, genetics, and ecology. If you want to get a medal in the international competition, then, you probably need to read the text book material for each topic to get the basic concepts.

For example, for molecular cell biology, you need to know about electrophoresis. My point was, in the exam, you won't be asked about what is electrophoresis. They will give you an example of an experiment/published paper, give you the background of that experiment, give you the experiment results (including electrophoresis results), and then ask you about the conclusion of the experiment.

I don't understand why they protect the past exams with a password[0], but here's one sample question from my archive: https://i.imgur.com/nMW7g9b.jpg

Feel free to reach out to me via email if you want to discuss more.

[0] https://www.ibo-info.org/en/info/papers.html

> I don't understand why they protect the past exams with a password

As someone who administered the National Biology Competition in Canada and supported profs in administering the largest first-year biology course in Canada, I can say that there is a LOT of politics behind protecting past tests.

It's just so much labour to have professionals write new tests every year, when writing tests is not what they want to be doing. It comes from the urge to reclaim their time, and build a library instead of going thought the same heavy slog every year

Oh wow. I also used to be in the committee for the National Biology Competition in my country. And yes, it's very hard to make a high quality question, so sometimes we reuse or reskin old problems. A student who has access to past exams archive have significant advantage.

I don't understand why they lock it for international though. AFAIK each year they require every country to provide a couple of questions, and then they will compile it for the exam. Not sure whether they are still doing this.

The thing that would happen then is private cram schools will make their students recover the past test questions from memory, and build up a huge database of questions that only their students have access to. This is how things went in South Korea, and probably explains a part of why they always win so many gold medals.

I did math and physics competitively and all the exams are very easy to access online, which meant that questions were generally "new" each time. It's interesting to see this not be the case…I honestly can't understand how this would reasonably work, because the people who were good literally kept copies of all the problems that they did, so a cottage industry of past tests would inevitably exist anyways.

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