4 ms·
I've never heard of the Andy Grove fallacy, but it is extremely relevant. As a bioinformatician actively working in the field, I get the same statements from pe
by daemonk 9y ago
I've never heard of the Andy Grove fallacy, but it is extremely relevant. As a bioinformatician actively working in the field, I get the same statements from people in the tech industry. Often it comes down to: "why don't you just apply this cool new technique and all your problems will be solved".
I think people need to realize that biology and tech are disciplines that might traverse on the same track, but in opposite directions.
Biology is going from top-down where we have an incredibly complicated system that we need to dissect and reduce down to workable fundamental parts. In tech/computer-science, we are going bottom-up where have man-made fundamental parts that we build up into incredibly complicated systems to perform a function.
We are kinda at the point where both disciplines are starting to intersect each other on the same track; hence the popularity of biotech right now.
- kirse 9y agoBiology is going from top-down where we have an incredibly complicated system that we need to dissect and reduce down to workable fundamental parts. The additional problem there is biology (and the underlying physics) is currently in a state where the known-unknowns continue to increase at an exponential rate. Exploration to reduce physical/biological systems into workable parts continue to reveal even further constituent sub-systems, which in turn opens up entire new fields of research and new unknowns to be explored (seemingly ad infinitum).
- daemonk 9y agoYeah agreed. I don't think most people actually understand the level of complexity involved in biology. A cell is literally a bag of molecules where everything inside is just bouncing around. And somehow, things self organize and stuff works and performs functions. And that's just one single cell. My background is in developmental biology, we have some mechanistic answers to how cells organize to maintain tissue polarity, but nothing really concrete.
- visarga 9y agoOne thing I discovered recently is that genes form a 'gene regulatory network' that bears some analogy to neural networks. Genes are like neurons, each with inputs and outputs interconnected in a complex way between them, and the chemical messages they pass around are proteins. So there is a whole 'neural net' inside each cell - this information put cell complexity in perspective for me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_regulatory_network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_regulatory_network
- hprotagonist 9y agoThe origin of the phrase: http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2007/11/06/andy_grove_rich_famous_smart_and_wrong http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2007/11/06/and...