LetThereBeLight

What the author appears to be describing is the experience of being a PhD student/postdoc that he misses. As faculty you are (usually) no longer running experiments and analyzing data, but managing people/projects, writing/reviewing papers, teaching, sitting on committees, and constantly applying for grants. While it is indeed unlikely he can find a faculty position after 7 years of being out of academia, he may in fact be happier looking for a senior scientist position at a university. As long as he is okay with the salary that is.

>Being skeptical of the conventional wisdom can be useful, but keeping yourself intentionally ignorant of it is generally a bad plan.

Yes, I agree with this. It follows along the lines of the saying: You must learn the rules before you can break them. With that said, I have seen many 1st year graduate students spend weeks/months going through the literature only to come up with project ideas that are close derivatives of published works. This usually happens because a student put too much focus on absorbing the "conventional wisdom" of the field rather than starting with a question and seeing what research has already been done to address it.

However, there are plenty of scientists who disagree with this sentiment. I had a colleague who would quote Feynman, "I never pay any attention to anything by experts. I calculate everything myself." Maybe that works if you are Feynman, but I seem to recall John Preskill saying that he didn't think this mentality served Feynman well, at least in his later years.

Indeed. In fact there are several works directly showing the formation of protein phase separation occurring at the inner membrane surface to cluster receptors [1,2].

[1] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/363/6431/1093 [2] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/352/6285/595

Doing biology, as in culturing cells and performing biochemical assays does not come cheap. Software and wetware development are totally different ball games in terms of upfront costs and risk levels. Just building a wetware proof of concept without university resources is non-trivial in terms of the resources it requires. I don't think biology fits at all in the standard startup model.

I am one of the 39 PhDs mentioned in this announcement. Very unexpected to see this on HN.