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As a computational biologist, I'm not so confident that Simons can make a huge impact in my field. At best, I would expect his institute to find a niche and imp
by mxwsn 9y ago
As a computational biologist, I'm not so confident that Simons can make a huge impact in my field. At best, I would expect his institute to find a niche and impact on the scale of a typical lab, but this pales in comparison to, say, the Broad institute which is a better peer with the Flatiron, what with lavish funding and a distinctive research philosophy than following NSF/NIH grants.
He prefers problems that aren't hopelessly complicated, but I suspect this is exactly where computational biology falls into if you don't have the ability to perform causal experiments. And wet lab experiments aren't being funded by the Flatiron.
- tikhonj 9y agoHow much impact does DE Shaw Research have? I think that would be the most direct point of comparison. I'm not asking this rhetorically—I'm curious but also don't have much experience to bioinformatics.
- ptero 9y agoMaybe he can help fix the process rather than provide some spectacular singular breakthrough. A common complaint I heard (from the outside, I do not work in biology) is that a large portion of scientists' productive time at many university labs is spent on finding funding. For example, if he establishes some initial funding streams and keeps it open long enough to see commercial benefits (10+ years) and uses those to transition this setup to self sufficiency (as opposed to a few unicorns spinning off), he could have a major long term impact.