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If you think my comments are "destructive criticism" then I invite you to post to a medchemist's site, like Derek Lowe's, or present at a medchemist's conferenc

by dalke 10y ago

If you think my comments are "destructive criticism" then I invite you to post to a medchemist's site, like Derek Lowe's, or present at a medchemist's conference and see the responses you get. By giving you all these pointers I am trying to provide the "constructive criticism" you say you want. I am also trying to establish my bona fides, so you might have a chance of accepting as true my statement that you've offered no insights which were not already known a century ago. It's not like the concepts underlying unit testing didn't exist before CS developed them. And I have no wish to put up with an eternal September here on HN when some enthusiastic engineer thinks the methods from that field can be moved over to drug development. It very similar to what Lowe, above, calls the 'Andy Grove fallacy' - http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2015/04/02/silicon_valley_sunglasses http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2015/04/02/sil... . Also, there's an entire field for the theory of the design of experiments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_of_experiments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_of_experiments . These are used in drug development. Perhaps it's software development which should incorporate ideas drug development, and not the other way around.

osharav 10y ago
I am not saying that Computer Engineering (not science) can magically overcome the challenges of drug development - that would indeed be fallacy. I am saying that one of the challenges in software development is to maintain progress in an ever changing world of modifications done to the product. I see similar challenges in the drug development field - And so I try to find the link between what has worked in software development to what exists in the drug development area. You say that due to the complexity of drug development and the huge difference between the two fields all I can say is that in both worlds we conduct experiments and in the drug development area you have a far better understanding of how to conduct these experiments effectively. You know better than me. You're right, I can offer no new insights, only the knowledge gained from experience (not necessarily theory). And from my experience what makes a product work is not the algorithms used, or the number of people working on it, or the technology used - it is how its progress is maintained via automated/constant testing. If you think that the resources spent on maintaining progress in the drug development world are suitable - that's good to know.
- dalke 10y ago
  Quoting from that Derek Lowe link to http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2015/04/02/silicon_valley_sunglasses http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2015/04/02/sil... since it seems to describe your situation almost perfectly: > There’s another problem that’s not unique to [Silicon] Valley, although it does tend to give people a bad case of it. That’s the “Clearly I’m smart and successful, so clearly I have something to offer in this other field over here” one. We all succumb to that one now and then; it’s human nature. ... If you’re used to being able to sit down and bang out code, any time, anywhere, with all kinds of tools (libraries, compilers, virtual machines, what have you) at your fingertips, then yeah, working up a new assay protocol in a cell line is going to seem agonizingly slow. Multibillion dollar ideas can be cranked out in the coding world very quickly, if you hit the right place at the right time, but just you try that in the lab. ... The real bottlenecks are figuring out what assay to run, and what to do with the data once you have it. ... > As much as I might like to see something like that happening in biopharma, though, I can’t quite make myself believe it. Technology, Silicon Valley style technology, is human-designed and human-optimized for other humans. As human beings, we’re playing on our home turf there. But the biology of disease is an away game if there ever was one. The inner workings of cells and the ways that they work together are flat-out alien compared to anything we’ve ever built ourselves. People who are used to coding up apps have never experienced anything like it, and many of them don’t seem to realize that they haven’t. Expecting the sorts of behavior that you get from human-built technologies, and expecting the same effects from the techniques that work to optimize them, is an expensive accident waiting to happen. As a related example, in the early 1990s AutoCAD thought they could enter molecular modelling, since they figured they could leverage what they knew from designing structures to design molecules. https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/chapter2_82.html https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/chapter2_82.html . You'll notice the lack of success, and HyperChem is a dead product.
  - osharav 10y ago
    I can't really see how the quote from Lowe's article is a reply to what I've written. I've done my best to be as humble as I can while still trying to offer something from my experience. You seem to be fixed on an image. You may call it silicon valley way of thinking or Andy Grove fallacy. It is unfortunate that it prevented you from replying to what I've written and instead caused you to paste in what is probably your auto response for any kind of an outside look on your field. I sure hope you know what you're doing.

by dalke 10y ago

osharav 10y ago

I am not saying that Computer Engineering (not science) can magically overcome the challenges of drug development - that would indeed be fallacy. I am saying that one of the challenges in software development is to maintain progress in an ever changing world of modifications done to the product. I see similar challenges in the drug development field - And so I try to find the link between what has worked in software development to what exists in the drug development area. You say that due to the complexity of drug development and the huge difference between the two fields all I can say is that in both worlds we conduct experiments and in the drug development area you have a far better understanding of how to conduct these experiments effectively. You know better than me. You're right, I can offer no new insights, only the knowledge gained from experience (not necessarily theory). And from my experience what makes a product work is not the algorithms used, or the number of people working on it, or the technology used - it is how its progress is maintained via automated/constant testing. If you think that the resources spent on maintaining progress in the drug development world are suitable - that's good to know.

dalke 10y ago
Quoting from that Derek Lowe link to http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2015/04/02/silicon_valley_sunglasses http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2015/04/02/sil... since it seems to describe your situation almost perfectly: > There’s another problem that’s not unique to [Silicon] Valley, although it does tend to give people a bad case of it. That’s the “Clearly I’m smart and successful, so clearly I have something to offer in this other field over here” one. We all succumb to that one now and then; it’s human nature. ... If you’re used to being able to sit down and bang out code, any time, anywhere, with all kinds of tools (libraries, compilers, virtual machines, what have you) at your fingertips, then yeah, working up a new assay protocol in a cell line is going to seem agonizingly slow. Multibillion dollar ideas can be cranked out in the coding world very quickly, if you hit the right place at the right time, but just you try that in the lab. ... The real bottlenecks are figuring out what assay to run, and what to do with the data once you have it. ... > As much as I might like to see something like that happening in biopharma, though, I can’t quite make myself believe it. Technology, Silicon Valley style technology, is human-designed and human-optimized for other humans. As human beings, we’re playing on our home turf there. But the biology of disease is an away game if there ever was one. The inner workings of cells and the ways that they work together are flat-out alien compared to anything we’ve ever built ourselves. People who are used to coding up apps have never experienced anything like it, and many of them don’t seem to realize that they haven’t. Expecting the sorts of behavior that you get from human-built technologies, and expecting the same effects from the techniques that work to optimize them, is an expensive accident waiting to happen. As a related example, in the early 1990s AutoCAD thought they could enter molecular modelling, since they figured they could leverage what they knew from designing structures to design molecules. https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/chapter2_82.html https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/chapter2_82.html . You'll notice the lack of success, and HyperChem is a dead product.
- osharav 10y ago
  I can't really see how the quote from Lowe's article is a reply to what I've written. I've done my best to be as humble as I can while still trying to offer something from my experience. You seem to be fixed on an image. You may call it silicon valley way of thinking or Andy Grove fallacy. It is unfortunate that it prevented you from replying to what I've written and instead caused you to paste in what is probably your auto response for any kind of an outside look on your field. I sure hope you know what you're doing.