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Comment by throwaway676712 | Hacker News Reader

Just a couple days ago I argued with an HN poster who quipped that biology is stamp collecting. A non-negligible number of "mathy" engineer types (not actual mathematicians, those usually understand the complexity of biology and even gladly contribute to the field) seem to think all biologists are quirky eccentrics dedicating 30 years to a single protein or a species of ants in the Kalahari desert. (Not that these don't exist or aren't worthy of respect, but they don't score high in the sophomoric 'hardness scale' of fields that these mathy types still subscribe to)

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The rub is of course it is actually far harder to work on your rare species of ant than to do something more "noble" like human genetics. You may have to build the reference genome yourself working on your ant before you can begin with other work. Collecting your ant samples and processing them eventually into raw sequence reads. You may have to optimize this library preparation process yourself if you are really in uncharted territory here.

Meanwhile human geneticist doesn't even need to collect any data. Reference genomes are always being improved. People dump their data into public repositories (at least public for other credentialed researchers). A couple emails and filling of approval forms and you too can have access to 10,000 patient samples of some human disease already sequenced for you to an acceptable depth. Of course you will still need to pay for downstream compute needs in money and your time crafting the analysis to suit your reasoning, but still, half the battle is already won when you work on these well trodden paths. So much necessary groundwork has been performed by others for you already.

I think that it's just because a lot of that is grunt work, a bit like getting a PhD by studying mice, with a little bit of theory at the end of a lot of repetitive work, whereas maths is generally the complete opposite of that: no practical, all cerebral work.

I'm not a maths person; that's just what I've observed.

There always seems to be a difference between the "normal" stamp collecting biology, and the anatomy/genetics biology. The latter part is always more fascinating to me (and I'm better at it) than the former. In essence, intra-organism biology >> inter-organism biology.

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