3 ms·

> Guys, the bio side of things is incredibly complicated I always find it amusing when physicists talk about how mind-blowing it is that at the quantum level,

by vacri 10y ago

> Guys, the bio side of things is incredibly complicated I always find it amusing when physicists talk about how mind-blowing it is that at the quantum level, things aren't entirely predictable. Over in biology, that's the starting point for everything rather than the final frontier - you don't need ridiculously expensive tools to get to the point where you're finding unpredictable stuff.

apathy 10y ago
You don't need a ridiculously expensive rig to find that in physics, either: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment laser pointer plus a sharp enough carbide wheel (trained as a chemist, grad school in biostats & genetics, now mostly design experiments & clinical trials... I have physics envy, except I don't envy their funding models!)
- Balgair 10y ago
  The double slit experiment is purely random, not unknowable. There is a large difference. In Bio, we will some day conceivably know enough to get to the point where we can build up stat models like the double slit experiment. I'd say that the double slit experiment is still leaps and bounds a better starting point than anything we have in bio and only took ~2 decades to finally parse out. Bio has been chugging along since Watson for ~8 decades before we finally got CRISPR and could really do anything about DNA.
  - apathy 10y ago
    Cre-Lox systems predate CRISPR/Cas9 or CRISPR/Cfp1 approaches by quite some time. If one exists for the system you want to study, they also tend to work better. (floxing the original mouse is, however, substantially harder) I don't think it's entirely accurate to say that conditional editing of DNA is a new thing. The ready accessibility and combinatorial possibilities, yes, but for targeted conditional knockouts, floxing mice has been a thing for about 20 years now.
  - j7ake 10y ago
    Crispr is definitely not the first technology for manipulating the genome.

by vacri 10y ago

apathy 10y ago

You don't need a ridiculously expensive rig to find that in physics, either: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment laser pointer plus a sharp enough carbide wheel (trained as a chemist, grad school in biostats & genetics, now mostly design experiments & clinical trials... I have physics envy, except I don't envy their funding models!)

Balgair 10y ago
The double slit experiment is purely random, not unknowable. There is a large difference. In Bio, we will some day conceivably know enough to get to the point where we can build up stat models like the double slit experiment. I'd say that the double slit experiment is still leaps and bounds a better starting point than anything we have in bio and only took ~2 decades to finally parse out. Bio has been chugging along since Watson for ~8 decades before we finally got CRISPR and could really do anything about DNA.
- apathy 10y ago
  Cre-Lox systems predate CRISPR/Cas9 or CRISPR/Cfp1 approaches by quite some time. If one exists for the system you want to study, they also tend to work better. (floxing the original mouse is, however, substantially harder) I don't think it's entirely accurate to say that conditional editing of DNA is a new thing. The ready accessibility and combinatorial possibilities, yes, but for targeted conditional knockouts, floxing mice has been a thing for about 20 years now.
- j7ake 10y ago
  Crispr is definitely not the first technology for manipulating the genome.