And there it is. The first assumption is that my background is in CS and not biology, that I do not understand the nature of your deeply mysterious arts. You yo

And there it is. The first assumption is that my background is in CS and not biology, that I do not understand the nature of your deeply mysterious arts. You yourself hang out on HN, I hope the irony isn't lost. This whole attitude is exactly why there is no decent seed funding for biology. Too conservative, too risk-adverse. The ivory tower knows best. The obsession with "better to die from cancer than from an untested treatment". It took decades for Right to Try to become reality and still there is tremendous opposition. Let's leave the orphan drug rent-seeking to private equity funds. Individual researchers should "know their place" and thrive only in the generosity and largesse of pharmaceutical giants. It is no wonder people are losing faith in the biological sciences. When computing is bringing breakthrough after breakthroughs, what has biology given us? Some new materials? Marginally improved treatments? How many magnitude level improvements have you seen? Where is my iPhone? Where are my VR goggles? Most if not all improvements are slow incremental gains built on the blood, sweat, and tears of poorly-paid phds who will be lucky to get paid 6 figures after graduation. It is easy to "look back on the decade" and pat yourself on the back, celebrating the oh-so-vast gains. The gains in biology hardly holds a candle to how much computing has advanced. The field of electronics has gotten cheaper than ever. Yet in biology, just how many people do you think have access to say, cryogenic electron microscopy? This isn't on Stanford light source level of difficulty, but there has been no effort at all to democratise the technology. Your ML researchers have access to ASICs for computing mere months after they get designed, both actual hardware and in the cloud. Tons of funding and development being put into improving developer user experience. Can you say the same for biology? The amount of "data processing" for a cryo microscope is trivial by modern cloud standards. Where are the Raspberry Pis, the Arduinos, of biology? Where are the cheap microscopy equipment clones? Because there is no market. There is no demand for biology.