Dear Gatsky, My point is not that there is no engineering or no biotech in the world - to the contrary. There is antibody engineering, biomedical engineering,

Dear Gatsky, My point is not that there is no engineering or no biotech in the world - to the contrary. There is antibody engineering, biomedical engineering, and many other types of engineering. I am a computational biologist. I actually worked at the George Church Lab, playing with the Polonator (an early sequencer prototype). I started a computational biology company (Seven Bridges Genomics), and then spun a biotech from it. So I truly believe in engineering. Try to think of my argument as trying to add higher resolution to the debate, instead of being against/for your argument. My main argument is against over-crediting what the software and algorithmic component of this is, precisely because I think it is too important. Another wider argument is are humans rationally designing anything / do we understand the wider design principles. So let's go back to immunotherapy. Neither the target PD1/PDL1, nor the therapies themselves were enabled in particular by "in-silico" methods. Nivolumab and Pembrolizumab were not designed with much algorithmic or software input, but discovered through good old experiments / lab science/engineering. There is no human designer or algorithm in the world where if I give a target, they can rationally design an antibody. What we do is brute force + affinity selection / "directed evolution" to force nature come up with an answer still. We have no clue how to design it like one would design a bridge. I think CAR-T is amazing technology - my point there remains: the therapies so far did not at use in-silico design of the Chimeric Antigen Receptor so far (the CAR part).. The low success in the clinic is precisely due to our inability to actually design these things properly. Similarly, neoantigen selection remains a big challenge due to lack of rational principles. A CAR is not too different from a TCR or Antibody, which we don't know how to rationally design. I believe that genome writing is a major challenge. Again you are widely missing my point: Suppose you had a very cheap, abundant, perfect genome writer. What would we write? George, who was an advisor to my first company and kicked off our Hackathon, would be the first to admit that protein design is a major challenge. Venter wrote an entire organism - and it was mycoplasma verbatim. We are only able to copy nature or cajole it at the moment, because fundamentally we don't know how to design biology. It is because we don't really understand it very well, which makes it such an exciting time to be in the field. None of this means these won't be done, or that teams around the world are not trying to do it this moment. There are amazing labs and companies working on these. What I am saying is more specific: Immunotherapy, CAR-T, or genome writing, in its first generation, as it exists, cannot be recruited as a showcase for computationally led, "in-silico" driven advances in biology. I do believe this will change shortly.