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I despise the computational/biologist split, where biologists know next to nothing and can't even sort a spreadsheet. These days the bar to being a "computation

I despise the computational/biologist split, where biologists know next to nothing and can't even sort a spreadsheet. These days the bar to being a "computational biologist" is super-low. (1) Can you login to a unix machine and write a bash script? (2) Do you know what 'variance' is? You're good to go! Because 99% of biologists don't know either of these things and don't care to. The number one thing that most biologists need (that most scientists need) is a basic understanding of statistics when doing experimental design. Sure, you can get this by having a computational biologist on staff, always timidly raising their voice to get you to add replicates, for fuck's sake. But - how about learning this stuff yourself, so your experiments (which rely deeply on statistical reasoning) aren't shit to begin with? My goal as a computational biologist isn't to do work for or correct biologists who don't understand statistics, it's to get biologists tools to do this kind of work easily on their own and bridge the gap in understanding. At the end of the day, computational biologists can't have the important domain-specific insights; biologists need to start understanding the datasets better themselves so they can apply their domain knowledge to it, and computational biologists need to be making tools to help them get there. Interdisciplinary work succeeds best by constructing interdisciplinarians who have all of the skills.

jghn 10y ago
Depends on where you are. At my company you generally need a Phd in something like CS, Math or Physics to even be considered.
- apathy 10y ago
  You make it sound like that's a difficult thing to acquire. But, as my dissertation adviser pointed out, "[apathy], you have to remember that Really Stupid People get PhDs all the time. Don't let me down."
  - apathy 10y ago
    Also, I had a discussion with a theoretical physicist recently where we spent almost half an hour bemoaning the myriad ways in which experimental design was ignored in our (hard science) undergrad programs, as well as many if not most graduate programs. It's sad.
  - jghn 10y ago
    It's above my intellect level. You miss the point however, I was responding to a point that biologists we're finding their way into comp bio roles without computational skills
    - apathy 10y ago
      It's not above your intellect. That's the whole point. Credentials are mostly bullshit unless accompanied by primary evidence. Think for yourself first. If necessary, and only if necessary, feel free to use credentials as potential tiebreakers. Having students (particularly mathematicians) has reminded me that only derivation and demonstration really count in science. All the rest is artifice.
skosuri 10y ago
Agreed. You'd probably enjoy this piece by Sean Eddy: http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pcbi.0010006 http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371%2Fj...
njbooher 10y ago
Why do you want to invest that much energy into trying to help a field that doesn't care to understand your work and ignores its warnings/conclusions?
- astazangasta 10y ago
  It is my field; my training is as a biologist, and I love the science. Plus my frustration indicates a problem worth solving.
j7ake 10y ago
I think making tools is a great thing to do as a computational biologist... But I feel the main goal of a computational biologist is not to just make tools but to make discoveries in ways that biologists could not have even dreamed of. I hope one day this field of computational biology can stop calling themselves computational biologists and simply call themselves biologists. I also find sometimes the inverse is true: computational biologists who don't know any biology. I think there is work on both sides to bridge the gap.
- ende 10y ago
  > I hope one day this field of computational biology can stop calling themselves computational biologists and simply call themselves biologists. Absolutely.
ende 10y ago
I agree with your overall point and particularly the first part. Computational biologists and laboratory biologists are both biologists, just with different tool sets. I disagree, however, with your last paragraph - in particular the notion of computational biologists as tool builders. You're absolutely right that lab biologists need to get with the times and become more computer-literate and data-literate. It's not the responsibility of computational biologists to shepherd them though, they have their own research to do. I think the divide that you point to exists largely because the field is still predominantly occupied by either old school wet bench biologists who won't learn new things (and more disturbingly don't think their grad students need to learn any either), and computer scientists / statisticians who migrated into the field from elsewhere some decades ago and still retain a sense of being outsiders. The next generations of biologists, however, should increasingly resemble a true merging of these two groups. No tool can compensate for an inability to understand statistically valid experimental design or how to manipulate genomic data, and a laboratory biologist who generates this data without being able to do these things isn't much of a biologist. Likewise a computational biologist that doesn't have those important domain-specific insights might not actually be much of a biologist either.

jghn 10y ago

Depends on where you are. At my company you generally need a Phd in something like CS, Math or Physics to even be considered.

apathy 10y ago
You make it sound like that's a difficult thing to acquire. But, as my dissertation adviser pointed out, "[apathy], you have to remember that Really Stupid People get PhDs all the time. Don't let me down."
- apathy 10y ago
  Also, I had a discussion with a theoretical physicist recently where we spent almost half an hour bemoaning the myriad ways in which experimental design was ignored in our (hard science) undergrad programs, as well as many if not most graduate programs. It's sad.
- jghn 10y ago
  It's above my intellect level. You miss the point however, I was responding to a point that biologists we're finding their way into comp bio roles without computational skills
  - apathy 10y ago
    It's not above your intellect. That's the whole point. Credentials are mostly bullshit unless accompanied by primary evidence. Think for yourself first. If necessary, and only if necessary, feel free to use credentials as potential tiebreakers. Having students (particularly mathematicians) has reminded me that only derivation and demonstration really count in science. All the rest is artifice.

skosuri 10y ago

Agreed. You'd probably enjoy this piece by Sean Eddy: http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pcbi.0010006 http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371%2Fj...

njbooher 10y ago

Why do you want to invest that much energy into trying to help a field that doesn't care to understand your work and ignores its warnings/conclusions?

astazangasta 10y ago
It is my field; my training is as a biologist, and I love the science. Plus my frustration indicates a problem worth solving.

j7ake 10y ago

I think making tools is a great thing to do as a computational biologist... But I feel the main goal of a computational biologist is not to just make tools but to make discoveries in ways that biologists could not have even dreamed of. I hope one day this field of computational biology can stop calling themselves computational biologists and simply call themselves biologists. I also find sometimes the inverse is true: computational biologists who don't know any biology. I think there is work on both sides to bridge the gap.

ende 10y ago
> I hope one day this field of computational biology can stop calling themselves computational biologists and simply call themselves biologists. Absolutely.

ende 10y ago

I agree with your overall point and particularly the first part. Computational biologists and laboratory biologists are both biologists, just with different tool sets. I disagree, however, with your last paragraph - in particular the notion of computational biologists as tool builders. You're absolutely right that lab biologists need to get with the times and become more computer-literate and data-literate. It's not the responsibility of computational biologists to shepherd them though, they have their own research to do. I think the divide that you point to exists largely because the field is still predominantly occupied by either old school wet bench biologists who won't learn new things (and more disturbingly don't think their grad students need to learn any either), and computer scientists / statisticians who migrated into the field from elsewhere some decades ago and still retain a sense of being outsiders. The next generations of biologists, however, should increasingly resemble a true merging of these two groups. No tool can compensate for an inability to understand statistically valid experimental design or how to manipulate genomic data, and a laboratory biologist who generates this data without being able to do these things isn't much of a biologist. Likewise a computational biologist that doesn't have those important domain-specific insights might not actually be much of a biologist either.