Comment by Simp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Simp | Hacker News Reader

The entire point of the "Future and Emerging Technologies" FET Flagship program (where the HBP got it's money) was to fund risky, daring and ambitious technology projects.

Here's an article about the Human Genome Project from 1990: http://www.nytimes.com/1990/06/05/science/great-15-year-proj...

"The critics argue that the human genome project has been sold on hype and glitter, rather than its scientific merits, and that it will drain talent, money and life from smaller, worthier biomedical efforts."

"They also doubt that the project can be completed in anything close to its original deadline and budget."

"it will have generated enormous reams of uninterpretable and often useless data"

"it's hyped science"

"Everybody I talk to thinks this is an incredibly bad idea"

"Some critics have begun aggressive letter-writing campaigns"

The exact same arguments that were used 25 years ago to discredit the HGP are now resurfacing to criticize the HBP. And with genome sequencing now below 1000$, that article has become almost laughable.

Many aspects of HGP were overhyped and much of the data remains uninterpretable. There was a strong implication that knowing the genome of humans would immediately lead to trivial improvements in health, but there wasn't actually a clear path to such improvements.

That said, it's an immensely valuable resource that pays back in many ways (it's a map which can be used for discovery science).

It's not entirely clear it drained talent and money from other projects in a way that was a net negative for science and society.

Just because the HGP turned out to be worthwhile doesn't mean funding it in the right place was the correct decision. If the expected value of the HGP was below the opportunity cost it should not have been funded. That the actual value turned out to be higher than the opportunity cost is irrelevant.

To say it another way, I think that playing the lotto with the goal of earning money is a mistake. The fact that some people win it and in fact make money doesn't change the fact that they were wrong to play it in the first place if their goal was net gain of money.

That said I have no idea what the expected value of the HGP was so I have no idea whether it was a good decision. I just want to chime in in support of thinking about the probabilities involved in the right way.

That's the thing, though: There's no way to calculate the value of fundamental research. We have lots of examples of breakthrough fundamental research with world-altering consequences, and we have many more examples of projects that went more-or-less nowhere.

If we want the big advances, we have to push the boundaries of what's known, but it's unclear where, exactly, the big breaks will happen. But doing these kind of mega-projects is, I think, basically a good thing, as it gets us out of the day-to-day of publishing easy papers, and into attacking the 'big' problems in new ways.

I believe that Maxwell was occasionally asked what real-world improvements his work would make in peoples' lives.

Expected value is a bit of a strange concept to apply to scientific research, as no-one really knows for certain what the full, long-term impact will be. The actual value of many scientific discoveries only becomes apparent years later on.

No one knows for certain, but... suppose you have two projects and can fund one of them.

Project A wants to investigate in as much depth as possible (given their budget) the effects of nail-biting on arthritis.

Project B wants to investigate in as much depth as possible (given their budget) the effects of learning a programming language on Alzheimer's disease.

I know which of these seems like a better choice for funding, even though I don't really know for certain what the long-term impact of either will be.

Couldn't we say that you have formed an estimate of both projects in your mind, and your estimate of the present value of all net benefits from project B is higher than your estimate of project A?

More or less. That sounds like it's giving me too much credit. I wouldn't say I have two estimates so much as one intuition - but that's what my intuition corresponds to, yes. If I made those estimates, I would expect to have a higher estimate for project B than project A.

(But I should note that I deliberately chose projects where it seemed obvious which one was better, so that I didn't need to do any calculations or even think very hard about which one to prefer. In reality, sometimes it's not obvious, and you should think hard and do calculations and it still might not be obvious, and the specific project being discussed is probably one of those cases.)

Which do you think is a better choice for funding, and why?

In support of project A: fibromyalgia, which has arthritic-type symptoms, is partly linked to anxiety, of which one of the common manifestation is nail-biting. Could evidence of nail-biting be a useful tool as part of differential diagnosis, or a predictor?

In support of project B: the idea of a 'cognitive reserve' in preventing the onset of Alzheimer's disease is fairly well established, even though it has no disease-modifying therapy once the symptoms of decline are already apparent. To what extent can learning a programming language aid that cognitive reserve?

I see your point though, but I'm not sure how well it applies to funding large-scale data collection work like the HGP. Or the LHC, to use an example in another field.

I don't think we can estimate the expected value exactly, but it nonetheless exists and our only option is to estimate it as accurately as possible (future value discounting the long term impacts of course). If the project doesn't have any practical use but opens up new avenues of research or just has value in any way then those benefits should count of course.

While I generally appreciate the way you think, the problem is likely that different people evaluate the expected value function of this project wildly differently - for perfectly legitimate reasons. The path to resolve this kind of conflict is not straightforward; barring some additional (and accepted) scientific insight, the matter is resolved politically.

The human genome project certainly was overhypered and had underdelivered on its biomedical benefits. You should look for articles, even in science press, about the 10th anniversary of the human genome project; it was not all roses, to say the least. In fact they were quite frank about it. The main governmental proponent, the current NIH director, acknowledged it as much. HOWEVER, there is no doubt HGP is a resounding scientific success for its technological breakthrough. Genome sequencing is now a basic scientific tool in all branches of biological science. Its impact on medicine will only increase. A lot of the recent crop of newly FDA approved drugs can be traced to genomic insights.

One good thing coming from HGP for the general public and journalists, I have noticed, is that they have more discernment regarding scientists' promises. Trust, but verify. There is a snowball's chance in hell that NIH will see a substantial budget increase in this decade, or the next for that matter.

BTW, that $1000 human genome sequencing claim is not believed by most scientists. Lawyers can argue it, especially Illumina's, but not according to common sense.

We're getting pretty close cost wise:

http://www.genome.gov/images/content/cost_genome.jpg

It's around 5k for whole genome sequencing atm and some googling showed that you can do exome sequencing for a lot cheaper (it's a very small fraction of human DNA).

This guy seems to think that the flattening of the tail on that graph is due to Illumina not having enough competition rather than being due to technical limitations at the moment.

http://www.synthesis.cc/2014/02/time-for-new-cost-curves-201...

Full Disclosure: I hold shares in Illumina.

Thanks man, was going to post this myself.

The very same arguments were made against the Human Genome Project, and yet look at where we are.

Not everyone agrees that the HGP was a success. Here's Freeman Dyson's take on it:

https://twitter.com/michael_nielsen/status/56599887195723366...

That was Freeman Dyson's take on it 18 years ago, before it was finished.

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