6 ms·

I'm in my 5th year of a chemical biology PhD and I'm looking to potentially move into computer science/data science (been programming for 15 years) after I grad

I'm in my 5th year of a chemical biology PhD and I'm looking to potentially move into computer science/data science (been programming for 15 years) after I graduate. Maybe we can just switch? I work with CRISPR for my project. In all seriousness, you are going to need a PhD if you want to truly understand all of the background of the field. Human biology/biochemistry is just about the most complex thing humans have ever studied. It would surely be easier to just find people with the requisite skill sets. Even if you just want to start a company, I feel that it would be really hard to pick out a scientific direction/what your company is going to do, without a rigorous scientific background

Ultimatt 7y ago
+1 for this is a PhD level thing. The science and technology is not at the sort of commodity level where you do a masters and you're done really. A good approach is to just get in the face of a lot of lab people working on new tech/IP who could really use software support for what they are doing in an area of trial and error that could otherwise scale. But if you are thinking biotech with lab, you need huge seed investment to begin with for the lab, unless you are spinning out of academia.
tomp 7y ago
Can you explain your reasoning behind need a PhD? It makes sense to me why you should learn a lot to understand a complex field, but I fail to see why you should also spend a few years researching a very narrow subfield... wouldn't it be better to be a generalist and be able to apply your knowledge widely, as opposed to only understanding a tiny sliver of the whole field?
- el_cujo 7y ago
  Yeah I'm not sure I agree you need a full-blown PhD just to understand this stuff. Some-hands on work, definitely. I would say that you need a PhD to be taken seriously as a leader on the science-side of a biotech company though.
  - notus 7y ago
    You don't need a PhD to find market fits for these types of products. They are self aggrandizing.
    - mattkrause 7y ago
      Market fit isn’t the only thing that matters. Theranos had an excellent market fit—-people hate having blood drawn—-but the technology did not work and fundamentally could not work. The whole point of being a subject matter expert is to learn about things like that. It’s true that there are other routes to becoming an expert in something (and proving it). A masters and a stint at a well-known company certainly works for many people; bootstrapping your own company might be an option too, but you’d need to be very successful to establish your bonafides. The advantage of a PhD is that it’s a fairly well-known quantity.
- shpongled 7y ago
  Presumably, this hypothetical biotech startup is going to be focused on some narrow niche of CRISPR technology, so being a specialist is exactly what's required in my mind. If the OP just wants to learn about CRISPR he could probably do a masters or even a year or two of self study. I find it very unlikely that they would be able to come up with something novel and marketable without even more hands on time.
  - tomp 7y ago
    But if PhD is basically learning followed by research, you could also just do a masters / learning followed by research at a company (directly relevant to what the company is doing)?
    - Ultimatt 7y ago
      There is a lot of professional development during PhD too. Especially if you're at a well funded institution with enough prestige to have a lot of international collaboration. The resources are typically a lot more experimental and RnD focussed than you will find in many companies. Having done a masters I'd say the "learning" there is rote and the sort of thing you do in school. PhD what you learn is how to actually see through BS you otherwise took as "truth" on a masters, see the landscape of research at play, which ideas have merit, which don't, what's interesting and likely has large implications etc. The actual skills and exposure is something quite tricky to explain but unless you do research in a really big company, it might be a lot harder to develop those. Especially if you are an entry level technician, as most of the more senior positions are likely to be those with PhDs already. At least in biotech, software and hardware it's way more about industry career paths and RnD.
- Ultimatt 7y ago
  Depends what sort of company you wish to produce. 23andMe you could definitely have done without a PhD as its much more traditional market fit "lets do logistics". But Illumina to produce the micro array in the first place or have the software to optimise probes etc. that takes a certain level of understanding have noticed or seen the value of that thing laying around in academia before it was mainstream. All the interesting new ideas/IP are sat within an academic network more than a company one at the moment so accessing that network is a big reason for a PhD.
- wiggles_md 7y ago
  You don’t need a PhD, but it helps. If you want to have a decent shot at getting funding from biotech VCs, the team overall needs experience in biotech AND startups, and the less experience the founder has in biotech the more the team will require to compensate for the deficiency. And vice versa for business experience, a freshly minted PhD is going to need team members with significant biotech BD experience. A PhD or MD counts towards experience in biotech. MS + years of industry experience also counts, as would BS + many years of industry experience. A PhD is nice because because it demonstrates deep experience in a narrow field plus an understanding of context. The context part is key. Autodidacts tend to miss out on the context, and their learned knowledge tends to be more fragile as a result, so there is a slight bias towards advanced degrees. Insufficient experience is a hard no for biotech. Nobody wants to see another Theranos, and notably biotech VCs didn’t put any money into Theranos. We’d like to keep it that way.
  - unearthed 7y ago
    > "You don’t need a PhD, but it helps." > "A PhD is nice because because it demonstrates ..." An employees willingness + investment to singularly do just one thing for the rest of their life. It works as really good signaling for a CEO / hiring manager to assess someone as a really consistent employee.
buboard 7y ago
> just about the most complex thing humans have ever studied The question is if the methods are complex. AFAIK computational biology involves statistics, statistics and statistics. The systems themselves are incredibly complex and interconnected , but the abstraction levels of the math involved are not incredibly high.
- shpongled 7y ago
  Sure, I guess my wording wasn't clear. It is the system itself that is complex, not the equations or statistics we use
- Ultimatt 7y ago
  There is statistics and then there is statistics. For example this paper is statistics based https://www.nature.com/articles/ng.3487 https://www.nature.com/articles/ng.3487 with some novel data too. But its stats over graphs, which is way less straight forward. You don't just fire up R and do model <- lme(data, x ~ y + z) That paper spawned a fairly amazing startup too one that I really really really doubt anyone could possibly have come up with without a PhD and a lot of insight https://mogrify.co.uk/ https://mogrify.co.uk/
codingdave 7y ago
> you are going to need a PhD if you want to truly understand all of the background of the field Is that the need, though? Few SaaS CEOs truly understand all the background of computer science. They do understand the problem space, but they leave it to the experts in the organization to get into the details of applying computer science to the problem. Is biology different, where the level of expertise needs to be at a more detailed level in order to lead an organization?
- Odenwaelder 7y ago
  In biology, the problem space is extremely vast and very hard to understand. I have a PhD in biology and find computer science relatively logical and simple. You can just look things up. Looking things up for a specific topic is not even easy in biology.
  - vbordo 7y ago
    > Looking things up for a specific topic is not even easy in biology How do you find info on bio topics right now?
    - Odenwaelder 7y ago
      Depends on how deep you want to go. You need to find out what people are working on, and you do this by searching on PubMed and talking to people working in that field.
      - vbordo 7y ago
        This sounds similar to what my friends in academia describe while exploring their fields. They build an impressive repository of knowledge regarding who's working on different topics/subfields over time. This may be one advantage of pursuing a PhD. Would be cool to see someone make the process of acclimating to a new field more accessible.
    - mattkrause 7y ago
      Finding the actual info is not terribly difficult: Google Scholar and Pubmed, maybe with some of the arxivs. The trick is interpreting it and putting it into context. A paper will report the results of one specific experiment, and it’s very rarely exactly what you want. Understanding how a result will generalize to other conditions is tricky, even for experts: there are tons of weird feedback loops, unusual dynamics, and other traps for the unwary (plus badly designed experiments and the occasional legit Type I error). For example, doubling the amount of a substance almost never doubles its effect, and in some cases, the effects aren’t even monotonic: ~75% alcohol, for example, is a much better disinfectant than 50 or 100%. With time—-and lots of paper-reading, you do eventually develop a sense for what factors might matter and how you could check.
julius_set 7y ago
Ignore this. I studied Genetics and CS. What you can do instead is reach out to the PhDs and gather information from them to start getting a general sense of the direction. This is easy some schools allow you to sit in on lectures / come to events. Most PhDs are usually off working independently though. Make friends with the competent PhDs gather info. Hack the system you don’t need a PhD you can hire one later. This is all assuming you have the raw talent of product and can lead well, and can convince people exceptionally well, otherwise disregard.
aaavl2821 7y ago
No one can truly understand all of the background for the field. Doing so would require like 10 PhDs It is important to have a fundamental understanding of biology and chemistry, and ability to critically evaluate data, but once you have that, its more important to be able to find people with the right domain expertise and have productive interviews with them about data. If you are a neuroscience PhD you should not be evaluating a cancer assay or a GLP tox study on your own, you should read enough to have a productive interview with someone with more expertise, then go have that interview You need a rigorous science background to start a company but that is not sufficient. Many projects are just not fundable. For non scientists, id recommend learning how the industry works and how value is created, because that complements the expertise of scientists who know the science but dont know the right clinical applications
unearthed 7y ago
Hire the PHD. God knows they'll work for 3rd-world labor rates.

Ultimatt 7y ago

+1 for this is a PhD level thing. The science and technology is not at the sort of commodity level where you do a masters and you're done really. A good approach is to just get in the face of a lot of lab people working on new tech/IP who could really use software support for what they are doing in an area of trial and error that could otherwise scale. But if you are thinking biotech with lab, you need huge seed investment to begin with for the lab, unless you are spinning out of academia.

tomp 7y ago

Can you explain your reasoning behind need a PhD? It makes sense to me why you should learn a lot to understand a complex field, but I fail to see why you should also spend a few years researching a very narrow subfield... wouldn't it be better to be a generalist and be able to apply your knowledge widely, as opposed to only understanding a tiny sliver of the whole field?

el_cujo 7y ago
Yeah I'm not sure I agree you need a full-blown PhD just to understand this stuff. Some-hands on work, definitely. I would say that you need a PhD to be taken seriously as a leader on the science-side of a biotech company though.
- notus 7y ago
  You don't need a PhD to find market fits for these types of products. They are self aggrandizing.
  - mattkrause 7y ago
    Market fit isn’t the only thing that matters. Theranos had an excellent market fit—-people hate having blood drawn—-but the technology did not work and fundamentally could not work. The whole point of being a subject matter expert is to learn about things like that. It’s true that there are other routes to becoming an expert in something (and proving it). A masters and a stint at a well-known company certainly works for many people; bootstrapping your own company might be an option too, but you’d need to be very successful to establish your bonafides. The advantage of a PhD is that it’s a fairly well-known quantity.
shpongled 7y ago
Presumably, this hypothetical biotech startup is going to be focused on some narrow niche of CRISPR technology, so being a specialist is exactly what's required in my mind. If the OP just wants to learn about CRISPR he could probably do a masters or even a year or two of self study. I find it very unlikely that they would be able to come up with something novel and marketable without even more hands on time.
- tomp 7y ago
  But if PhD is basically learning followed by research, you could also just do a masters / learning followed by research at a company (directly relevant to what the company is doing)?
  - Ultimatt 7y ago
    There is a lot of professional development during PhD too. Especially if you're at a well funded institution with enough prestige to have a lot of international collaboration. The resources are typically a lot more experimental and RnD focussed than you will find in many companies. Having done a masters I'd say the "learning" there is rote and the sort of thing you do in school. PhD what you learn is how to actually see through BS you otherwise took as "truth" on a masters, see the landscape of research at play, which ideas have merit, which don't, what's interesting and likely has large implications etc. The actual skills and exposure is something quite tricky to explain but unless you do research in a really big company, it might be a lot harder to develop those. Especially if you are an entry level technician, as most of the more senior positions are likely to be those with PhDs already. At least in biotech, software and hardware it's way more about industry career paths and RnD.
Ultimatt 7y ago
Depends what sort of company you wish to produce. 23andMe you could definitely have done without a PhD as its much more traditional market fit "lets do logistics". But Illumina to produce the micro array in the first place or have the software to optimise probes etc. that takes a certain level of understanding have noticed or seen the value of that thing laying around in academia before it was mainstream. All the interesting new ideas/IP are sat within an academic network more than a company one at the moment so accessing that network is a big reason for a PhD.
wiggles_md 7y ago
You don’t need a PhD, but it helps. If you want to have a decent shot at getting funding from biotech VCs, the team overall needs experience in biotech AND startups, and the less experience the founder has in biotech the more the team will require to compensate for the deficiency. And vice versa for business experience, a freshly minted PhD is going to need team members with significant biotech BD experience. A PhD or MD counts towards experience in biotech. MS + years of industry experience also counts, as would BS + many years of industry experience. A PhD is nice because because it demonstrates deep experience in a narrow field plus an understanding of context. The context part is key. Autodidacts tend to miss out on the context, and their learned knowledge tends to be more fragile as a result, so there is a slight bias towards advanced degrees. Insufficient experience is a hard no for biotech. Nobody wants to see another Theranos, and notably biotech VCs didn’t put any money into Theranos. We’d like to keep it that way.
- unearthed 7y ago
  > "You don’t need a PhD, but it helps." > "A PhD is nice because because it demonstrates ..." An employees willingness + investment to singularly do just one thing for the rest of their life. It works as really good signaling for a CEO / hiring manager to assess someone as a really consistent employee.

buboard 7y ago

> just about the most complex thing humans have ever studied The question is if the methods are complex. AFAIK computational biology involves statistics, statistics and statistics. The systems themselves are incredibly complex and interconnected , but the abstraction levels of the math involved are not incredibly high.

shpongled 7y ago
Sure, I guess my wording wasn't clear. It is the system itself that is complex, not the equations or statistics we use
Ultimatt 7y ago
There is statistics and then there is statistics. For example this paper is statistics based https://www.nature.com/articles/ng.3487 https://www.nature.com/articles/ng.3487 with some novel data too. But its stats over graphs, which is way less straight forward. You don't just fire up R and do model <- lme(data, x ~ y + z) That paper spawned a fairly amazing startup too one that I really really really doubt anyone could possibly have come up with without a PhD and a lot of insight https://mogrify.co.uk/ https://mogrify.co.uk/

codingdave 7y ago

> you are going to need a PhD if you want to truly understand all of the background of the field Is that the need, though? Few SaaS CEOs truly understand all the background of computer science. They do understand the problem space, but they leave it to the experts in the organization to get into the details of applying computer science to the problem. Is biology different, where the level of expertise needs to be at a more detailed level in order to lead an organization?

Odenwaelder 7y ago
In biology, the problem space is extremely vast and very hard to understand. I have a PhD in biology and find computer science relatively logical and simple. You can just look things up. Looking things up for a specific topic is not even easy in biology.
- vbordo 7y ago
  > Looking things up for a specific topic is not even easy in biology How do you find info on bio topics right now?
  - Odenwaelder 7y ago
    Depends on how deep you want to go. You need to find out what people are working on, and you do this by searching on PubMed and talking to people working in that field.
    - vbordo 7y ago
      This sounds similar to what my friends in academia describe while exploring their fields. They build an impressive repository of knowledge regarding who's working on different topics/subfields over time. This may be one advantage of pursuing a PhD. Would be cool to see someone make the process of acclimating to a new field more accessible.
  - mattkrause 7y ago
    Finding the actual info is not terribly difficult: Google Scholar and Pubmed, maybe with some of the arxivs. The trick is interpreting it and putting it into context. A paper will report the results of one specific experiment, and it’s very rarely exactly what you want. Understanding how a result will generalize to other conditions is tricky, even for experts: there are tons of weird feedback loops, unusual dynamics, and other traps for the unwary (plus badly designed experiments and the occasional legit Type I error). For example, doubling the amount of a substance almost never doubles its effect, and in some cases, the effects aren’t even monotonic: ~75% alcohol, for example, is a much better disinfectant than 50 or 100%. With time—-and lots of paper-reading, you do eventually develop a sense for what factors might matter and how you could check.

julius_set 7y ago

Ignore this. I studied Genetics and CS. What you can do instead is reach out to the PhDs and gather information from them to start getting a general sense of the direction. This is easy some schools allow you to sit in on lectures / come to events. Most PhDs are usually off working independently though. Make friends with the competent PhDs gather info. Hack the system you don’t need a PhD you can hire one later. This is all assuming you have the raw talent of product and can lead well, and can convince people exceptionally well, otherwise disregard.

aaavl2821 7y ago

No one can truly understand all of the background for the field. Doing so would require like 10 PhDs It is important to have a fundamental understanding of biology and chemistry, and ability to critically evaluate data, but once you have that, its more important to be able to find people with the right domain expertise and have productive interviews with them about data. If you are a neuroscience PhD you should not be evaluating a cancer assay or a GLP tox study on your own, you should read enough to have a productive interview with someone with more expertise, then go have that interview You need a rigorous science background to start a company but that is not sufficient. Many projects are just not fundable. For non scientists, id recommend learning how the industry works and how value is created, because that complements the expertise of scientists who know the science but dont know the right clinical applications

unearthed 7y ago

Hire the PHD. God knows they'll work for 3rd-world labor rates.