3 ms·

1. You said, "He doesn't do CRISPR research." If you are going ad hominim, it's usually better if you get your facts right. 2. FWIW, I think you are largely

by skosuri 11y ago

1. You said, "He doesn't do CRISPR research." If you are going ad hominim, it's usually better if you get your facts right. 2. FWIW, I think you are largely rewriting history by your comment. The dominant feeling I remember about the HGP at the time was that it wasn't worth it and we didn't learn any new bio. This feeling is still widespread... And biology has always been "hypothesis free"??? Really? Anyways, both of these points were largely ancillary imo to the early history of the field that I thought was an interesting viewpoint.

Gatsky 11y ago
We're just two guys arguing on the internet now, but here we go again. 1. To me, just having your name on a paper does not equal 'doing research in the field'. In the cases of these 2 papers, he is neither the senior author, nor does the first author come from his lab. He doesn't actually cite any of his own papers in the review, after all. 2. I'm not rewriting history because I'm talking about what people think about bioinformatics in the present because of the human genome project. Lander's point is that CRISPR informs our opinion about bioinformatics today, and I'm disagreeing this is a valid point etc etc see above. I agree with you that at the time HGP happened the reaction was lukewarm. But whatever you want to say about the impact on humanity, it is indisputable that the HGP has enabled so much science that relies on bioinformatics, and elevated bioinformatics to a key part of modern life science. Not going to get into the hypothesis free argument here, but the issue is essentially that in biology it is often impossible to specify all the necessary details of the model you are hypothesising about, which means that hypotheses have poor generalisability and reproducibility. This means that any progress we make isn't by virtue of falsifying hypotheses, but more by observation and investigation of phenomena which may have been observed by chance. Just the act of making a hypothesis does not make a science 'hypothesis driven' - those hypotheses actually need to contribute in a material fashion to the accumulation of knowledge or more importantly, insight.

by skosuri 11y ago

Gatsky 11y ago

We're just two guys arguing on the internet now, but here we go again. 1. To me, just having your name on a paper does not equal 'doing research in the field'. In the cases of these 2 papers, he is neither the senior author, nor does the first author come from his lab. He doesn't actually cite any of his own papers in the review, after all. 2. I'm not rewriting history because I'm talking about what people think about bioinformatics in the present because of the human genome project. Lander's point is that CRISPR informs our opinion about bioinformatics today, and I'm disagreeing this is a valid point etc etc see above. I agree with you that at the time HGP happened the reaction was lukewarm. But whatever you want to say about the impact on humanity, it is indisputable that the HGP has enabled so much science that relies on bioinformatics, and elevated bioinformatics to a key part of modern life science. Not going to get into the hypothesis free argument here, but the issue is essentially that in biology it is often impossible to specify all the necessary details of the model you are hypothesising about, which means that hypotheses have poor generalisability and reproducibility. This means that any progress we make isn't by virtue of falsifying hypotheses, but more by observation and investigation of phenomena which may have been observed by chance. Just the act of making a hypothesis does not make a science 'hypothesis driven' - those hypotheses actually need to contribute in a material fashion to the accumulation of knowledge or more importantly, insight.