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Comment by SteveVeilStream | Hacker News Reader

The more I learn about epigenetics, RNA, and DNA, the more convinced I am that we need to be investing much more heavily in this area. There are a lot of barriers. It starts with our education system where people need to be in school until they are far too old until they reach the edge of the state of the art. I think it's time to rethink parts of high school and university so that people can specialize in this area sooner. Funding is another major hurdle. A lot of traditional sources of funding don't map well to these problem areas where the risk and reward are both very high and the holding periods are long.

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Having gone through it I think the biggest hurdle is the 12ish credit hour paradigm in undergrad. You learn so much faster in grad school because you can actually dig in and focus on one subject or really one project within that subject at once. As a TA it was pretty common to hear students didn’t study at all for my exam because they had a chemistry exam that seemed more challenging and worthy of cramming, so as bio majors they failed the bio exam to cram for a chemistry prerequisite they might not have passed either. And I can tell you from experience that whatever they toil over in the library for that chemistry class that absolutely none of that will be used in their careers in biology or medicine. You don’t need to memorize how a paladium catalyst works in any job on this earth perhaps, but you need to do that and be able to see through basically a riddle on top of that to pass your ochem requirement, along with a dozen other similarly inane synthesis exercises you forget as soon as the term ends.

And what is worse, many students fail their ochem and the weight of that on their gpa sometimes forces a pivot out of the field entirely. Another potentially good scientist lost to unhelpful process.

Life sciences are hard because it's very labor intensive which means expensive. That's not going to change any time soon.

The labor is paid less than people flipping burgers usually. Post docs make less than fast food managers. Grad students less than the line cooks. And a lot of undergrads are “volunteering” or have half their wage paid by federal work study. A lot of labs their reagent costs are very low and they might used shared university equipment that’s already had a grant written to purchase it by the institution. It probably costs orders of magnitude more to outfit the kitchen at a mcdonalds than it does an average academic lab.

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