Ask HN: What Kind of Biology Study Did You Have in Higher Education? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What Kind of Biology Study Did You Have in Higher Education?

4 pointstokenadult3 comments

I'm trying to get a sense here of how many of the HN participants, who I wildly guess are mostly people who studied computer-related subjects in their most advanced education, also studied a higher-education course in biology or a related life science. My last formal course in biology was my university's first-year undergraduate honors biology course, a course popular with aspiring physicians. While I was at university, I developed quite a penchant for reading journal articles and monographs in the university's Bio-Medical Library, but a lot of new biological science has been discovered since I last took a formal school course in the subject. How about you? What life science courses have you taken? What books or journals do you read to keep up with the subject? I like PLoS Biology

http://www.plosbiology.org/

PLoS Medicine

http://www.plosmedicine.org/

and

PLoS Genetics

http://www.plosgenetics.org/

because they are free-beer free, Web-based, and current.

I just graduated with a BSc. in Biology from the University of California, Irvine. The plan was to go on as a physician, and thus, to fulfill med school requirements, I took 3 years of biology courses. Dna to Organisms, Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, Cellular Biology, Cellular Neurobiology, Language and the Brain, Neurology lab, Immunology, Human Physiology, and Evolutionary Biology, in no particular order.

By far, though, the best biology course I took was a graduate course called Systems Cell Biology, where we used Mathematica to create mathematical models of receptor responses and secondary messenger systems. Reason I loved it so much was, considering my lack of cs background, because it was the only class where I witnessed and experienced the the intersection of cs/mathematics and biology. The text we used in the class is called 'The Cell' by Alberts, and James Watson. I asked the professor of the class about further reading, and he suggested "2 texts: (1) An Introduction to Systems Biology: Design Principles of Biological Circuits (Alon, U.), and (2) Physical Biology of the Cell (Rob Phillips et al.)."

Hope that helped. You can email me for more info, email is in my profile.

Dna to Organisms

That sounds like a very interesting course. That would hardly have been possible to present in my undergraduate days. What was the content of that course?

Evolutionary Biology

I was hoping my introductory biology course would get more into evolutionary issues than it did. It hewed pretty closely to a plan of spewing out lots of essential facts without a lot of theoretical framework. I think the same course was presented much better just a few years later when a friend took it and a different professor was the lecturer.

I opted to take 2 intro to bioengineering courses during my computer engineering degree. We basically covered "Molecular Cell Biology" by Lodish. I really liked the courses. It was a bit hard getting used to reading the published papers, but I learned a lot.

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