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I should have loved biology

• m463 6y ago
  I read this and it it fills me with so much melancholy. I took biology 101 in college and what I thought would be really interesting turned out to be SO unexpectedly meaningless. Now years later all I recall is the memorization of phylums and kingdoms on one test and cell structures on another test and sitting in a large auditorium looking at the map and not the territory. The course was so much about WHAT and never about WHY. I don't know if I was immature, or if the biology course was a "weed out" course designed to filter out all but the most dedicated, or if biology education is off the rails. I do know that every subject would benefit from a little storytelling, a little excitement and a good helping of why.
  • spunkz 6y ago
    honestly i prefer the boring course, but everyone’s different, so at our school they offered the fun one as a regular credit and the boring one as an AP, and i think that worked out well for everyone
  • an_opabinia 6y ago
    > The course was so much about WHAT and never about WHY. Biology is pretty notorious for most stuff being arbitrary. There is no model. People who say there's a model, they're talking about something else - sometimes, a literal Platonic ideal of biology, that makes for an appealing pop science course, but not knowledge that like, helps you design experiments or better use drugs or whatever. From the article: > It was hard to get through a sentence without having to consult Wikipedia. In immunology in particular the nomenclature is expansive. This is a common refrain. "Paternal allo-antigens" for example, straight from the literature: people who do immunology research know what that means, they do not get tripped up like this author does. Programming computers and being good at math does not prepare you at all for understanding this stuff! Watson and Crick were not math savants. They did not have natural gifts.
    • mannykannot 6y ago
      > Watson and Crick were not math savants. They did not have natural gifts. They had the 'natural gift' of picking up on the clues hinting that DNA, rather than protein, was central to the mechanism of biological inheritance. It is the natural gift of being able to identify the key features of the forest despite the preponderance of obfuscating trunks and branches. It is the gift of seeing some sort of order behind cirucmstances in which almost all the details are accidental. Math synthesizes complexity; in biology, you have to analyze what's given.
      • 5d749d7da7d5 6y ago
        >They had the 'natural gift' of picking up on the clues hinting that DNA, rather than protein, was central to the mechanism of biological inheritance. That was Hershey and Chase [0]. Watson and Crick were the first to solve the structure of DNA. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hershey%E2%80%93Chase_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hershey%E2%80%93Chase_experime...
        • mannykannot 6y ago
          Point taken, though that article also says "Hershey and Chase concluded that protein was not likely to be the hereditary genetic material. However, they did not make any conclusions regarding the specific function of DNA as hereditary material, and only said that it must have some undefined role." Arguably, my general point still holds, though with an expanded cast of characters.
      • tejtm 6y ago
        my observations which I think broadly agrees. -Math/CS: inherently better at abstracting & are "proof" centric. -Life Sciences: inherently better at observing then reasoning and are "argument" centric. Coming from the CS side this is not a marriage made in heaven as opinions don't matter by design.
        • watwut 6y ago
          As a Math/CS graduate (I focused on mathy aspects of CS): math cs people struggle at working with real world abstractions. They abstract and simplify, but then tend to convince themselves that simplified model and its conclusions are totally all there is to reality. And if they accept that model is not super perfect, they completely reject model - to find another simplified model that they convince themselves if flawless. They struggle with the "this is model with such and flaws we need to keep in mind while interpreting".
  • eindiran 6y ago
    I think there are a few problems that result in this sad state of affairs, and unfortunately they are not constrained to biology (eg 'why isn't mathematics taught with wonder?'). 1. Teachers are required to do evaluations, and the way we have settled on doing evaluations is giving students giant, shitty tests. In order to pass these tests, lots of rote memorization is required. 2. Five years of being forced to teach-to-the-test latter, your original wonderment for the material is not going to shine through in period 5 bio. 3. The average teacher is over-worked, over-stressed, and worried about a lot of other baggage that comes along with being a teacher. This last point is true of teachers from public elementary schools all the way to professors at big research institutions (where many lecturers are researchers halfheartedly box-checking a teaching requirement). 4. Teaching - particularly pre-university - is viewed as a relatively low-status career (with a commensurate paycheck), at least in the US. A lot of the people who feel wonderment for these subjects and could teach them well end up being driven away from teaching as a result. There are teachers who manage to bring joy and wonderment into the classroom, despite all of the problems that lead us here. But we need to address these problems if we want the average bio classroom to be taught with wonder, instead of being 1-hour mind-numbing sessions where you pretend to be studying from your index cards.
    • Eridrus 6y ago
      I'm somewhat skeptical of this explanation since I went to a private secondary school in Australia where these pressures did not apply, and had the exact same experience with Biology where what we were taught was to memorize taxonomies that made me abandon the subject as early as possible.
      • pm90 6y ago
        One experience doesn’t disprove systemic reasons for the outcomes we’re seeing. Even if hypothetically all teachers were very well paid and the job was regarded as high status, there would be a nonzero chance that some kids still end up with shitty teachers.
      • bigger_cheese 6y ago
        I went to public school in Australia, there was a lot of memorization, I can remember my tests were always big on making us label diagrams (here's a kidney match the words with arrows, now do it for the liver, now do it for the heart) etc. But we also did some experimental stuff in Biology. Which at least was memorable to me. Aside from the ever present dissections I can remember one notable experiment in year 11 involving Agar-Gel plates, we took swabs from various places around our school (Taps in the bathroom, Classroom door handle, AC Vents etc) and incubated the plates and compared what sort of bacteria was found and whereabouts.
  • arsome 6y ago
    Yeah, it's pretty crazy how much I hated biology in high school but how much I love reading medical papers, drug mechanisms of action on wikipedia, watching Chubbyemu or Thought Emporium etc. There's just so much that I would have loved to learn in the field, but the practical starting points were just uninteresting rote memorization I guess so I could never enjoy it or see a practical use case. It seemed like the least interesting science to me, but now I wish I got more out of it. That or perhaps I can consume an absurd amount of pop-sci garbage.
  • FalconSensei 6y ago
    I would say it's also similar with other subjects, like history, which focus SO MUCH in memorizing dates and names, instead of actually understanding why things were happening.
    • FranzFerdiNaN 6y ago
      You cant understand why things happen if you don't know when they happen (the other way around works just fine, which is why quizzes on tv love to ask random dates). You need to know when Caesar crossed the Rubicon in relation to when other events happened to help you understand why he did what he did. If you think he conquered Gaul after becoming dictator your entire narrative changes. It sucks, but you really do need to know a lot of whens to help you contextualize the why. I've got a BA and MA in history and my first year at university was spend memorizing so many things, which was the absolute worst. But it did really does help a lot once you start doing your own research.
      • m463 6y ago
        well, hmmm... I think you can tell a good story just by painting a picture of the situation. (and I think of computer makefiles - you don't need to know times, you just need to know what depended on what, and what things combine to cause something)
      • watwut 6y ago
        I think that this is wrong. It is easier to remember sequence of events in logical order then arbitrary dates. You really dont need to remember exact date of when Caesar crossed the Rubicon in order to understand his motivations. You need context in enough details in order to understand motivations. > It sucks, but you really do need to know a lot of whens to help you contextualize the why. I always managed to memorize those dates in high school and elementary school. And then I promptly forgot them after test. I blamed my bad memory, but later when I learn how human memory works, I started to blame the way they taught us. People remember stories and systems well. Our memory works on relationships between facts. Most people sux at remembering unrelated arbitrary numbers. All that done to me was that I seen history as boring pointless class. Historical characters came across as somewhat inhuman, absurd unrealistical creatures. Their behavior made no sense. Yes, they were actual real people, but the way history was taught made them sound like badly written characters from mediocre fiction. It was only after I started to read history that was focused more on context, motivations and reasons I both starterd to long-term rememeber times+places and also like it.
  • kernoble 6y ago
    I excelled at AP biology, but college biology was a total drag. Honestly, it's just the teachers, my high school teachers taught with passion in college it was a chore for my professors. At least software has more jobs and better pay, even if it's less fundamentally interesting.
    • rjsw 6y ago
      All my high school biology teachers were good. As you point out, there are not as many other good jobs for biology graduates as there are for CS ones.
      • m463 6y ago
        that's a shame. I liked the quote in the article: Imagine a flashy spaceship lands in your backyard. The door opens and you are invited to investigate everything to see what you can learn. The technology is clearly millions of years beyond what we can make. This is biology.
    • dragonwriter 6y ago
      > I excelled at AP biology, but college biology was a total drag. Honestly, it's just the teachers, my high school teachers taught with passion in college it was a chore for my professors. An AP biology teacher in high school is teaching a class with disproportionately the most predisposed-to-be-engaged students, and its the central part of their job, in which they are secure and focussed. A lower-division biology professor in a university is probably teaching a class with disproportionately the least predisposed-to-be-engaged students, and if they are a tenured or tenure-track professor at a research university, its also not the core of their job (if they aren't, its a core part of their job -- but one in which they are insecure, are more likely to be adjusting to, and which may be one of several jobs.)
  • jonsno56 6y ago
    Agree - From personal experience, Biology undergraduate eeducation in the United States and its tendency toward rote learning seems optimized for medical school admissions (MCAT, are you tough enough?, etc) and not for becoming a biologist
  • redvenom 6y ago
    I'll tell you something about memorizing phyla, orders, families, genera, and species. If you've never had exposure to any of that, it might seem arbitrary. But now, go out in the woods and try and identify species you see. You can start with birds and mammals because they are the easiest. As you begin to do so, you can keep a record of them in a spreadsheet or notebook. Look up their biological classifications. All of a sudden the classification system will start to make sense, and help you understand the diversity of the organisms around you. Biology is one of those subjects where part of the context comes from being outdoors and trying to understand ecological relationships yourself. You don't have to get to the level of a pro biologist, but there is so much you can find out by experiencing nature and trying to understand the basics that anyone can do it.
    • viraptor 6y ago
      > As you begin to do so, you can keep a record of them in a spreadsheet or notebook. This is useful, but probably because you're inverting the order here. You start with the observing and classification and end up using names rather than starting with "learn those names and matches".
    • TeMPOraL 6y ago
      Which is why I suspect the obsession of education around the world with biological classification dates to the period where most people lived in the country, not in urban spaces. Us city kids, we didn't get to spend so much time in the woods, to see so many different kinds of plants and animals - and the ones we did, we've already known by their laymen names. Tangential: it would be helpful if schools explained to kids that all classifications are arbitrary, in biology and otherwise. Their value is in being useful, not correct to some magic metadata tags attached to things. In context of school biology, I wish we spent more time approaching the classification like: "See that thing in the picture? We classify it as X, because it has $property; subtype Y, because it has $different-property; ... subtype ABC, because initially biologists thought this is different from BCD; now we know it isn't, but the classification remains for now". It would all feel much less boring this way.
      • 6y ago
  • bootcampwhere 6y ago
    You people are so dumb trying to blame others for your lack of drive and interest. Study on your own, no one gives a shot if you like it or not all anyone can do is present you with the material. If you choose to ignore it you can't blame them.
  • brundolf 6y ago
    This is how nearly every STEM class I've ever taken has been (and really, things like history too). I retained a passing interest in math despite my classes. I was lucky to develop a foundational interest in programming before classes had the chance to ruin it. It's simply par for the course of our education system, at least in the United States. I wonder how many talented scientists never got started because they were turned off by their first exposure to a subject.
    • watwut 6y ago
      > I wonder how many talented scientists never got started because they were turned off by their first exposure to a subject. On the positive side, we dont need more scientists. There are too many people trying to be scientists leading to pretty shitty working conditions for PhDs and post docs.
      • fakedang 6y ago
        On the negative side, there are too many scientists and professors who should not have been.
      • throwaway316943 6y ago
        That is being caused by exactly the same nonsense that has been happening in high schools. You have to get a high school degree. Why? No one knows. Everyone has a high school degree so you have to get a college degree. Everyone has a college degree so you need to have a masters degree. On and on until the whole thing is a diploma mill and society collapses under the sheer weight of puffed up do nothings grubbing at the controls.
        • watwut 6y ago
          It is not? PhD is not particularly necessary for anything except working in universities and few labs. People who do PhD do it because they want to do science, not because they would thought it is necessary.
  • fabian2k 6y ago
    In school it seemed the same way to me, it was very superficial and my high school teacher was unable to anwer my "why" questions. At university it was very different, I finally got my questions answered. Part of that was certainly that it was much more in-depth, but the quality of the teaching and also the textbooks was just much higher. For me there were also maybe a few core things I didn't understand in school that are really crucial to put everything into context. The biggest one maybe being a tiny bit of thermodynamics and understanding what enzymes actually do and what they can't do. I do suspect that a major problem is trying to cover too much material, which makes the courses too superficial and makes it impossible to actually explain how stuff works, what problems are solved by specific biological systems and why they probably work the way they do.
  • dragonwriter 6y ago
    > The course was so much about WHAT and never about WHY. WHY is philosophy/metaphysics. WHAT is science.
• cee_el123 6y ago
  I did like biology but at the time couldn't connect it with the impact the field creates in human living. today I'm obsessed with understanding proteins because predicting protein structure, behaviour, interaction are really hard problems that would unlock huge medical advances if fully solved
• whatshisface 6y ago
  >Separate things of different sizes using gels and magnets. (“Gel electrophoresis.”) Just a minor point, electrophoresis uses electric fields not magnetic fields - hence its name, "electro-" as opposed to "magneto-".
• dannykwells 6y ago
  If you want to study biology, study evolution. Darwin. Dawkins. Gould. King. Biology only makes sense in light of evolution, and boy howdy is it beautiful.
  • viburnum 6y ago
    Biology doesn't have to make sense, it just is what it is.
    • dkural 6y ago
      Life is a self-sustaining, self-replicating chemical reaction. It obeys the laws of physics. It must somehow preserve the information necessary for its own genesis and regenesis at every generation. It must accumulate the energy needed for its functions from its environment. Makes sense?
  • friendlybus 6y ago
    Probably an annoying question... do you have an opinion on the mathetical unlikelyhood of evolution happening?
    • redvenom 6y ago
      Well, there are documented cases of evolution happening during our lifetimes. But I would say as a mathematical process, pretty likely once you have the basic ingredients. Richard Dawkins has written some good popular science books like 'Climbing Mount Improbable' that talks about evolution in this light. His 'Selfish Gene' is also an excellent read. It is slightly more technical but definitely understandable without an immense technical background.
    • adrianN 6y ago
      How can evolution not happen in a system where you have random mutation and some selection pressure?
      • friendlybus 6y ago
• medymed 6y ago
  On the other hand, one is more likely to rise to success in biology if memorizing countless and ever-increasing mountains of facts is not a taxing chore as you wait to accumulate enough context and experimental expertise see a pattern somewhere and know which assays lend to feasible testing of ideas. Intro biology classes (e.g. cell biology) can in this way often be weeder classes, sadly.
• nneonneo 6y ago
  This article rings so true to me. My father is a microbiologist - and now, so is my fiancée. I'm very lucky that I get to learn about genetics through osmosis now, and boy, is it ever fascinating! I had a dining-table discussion with my dad the other day where the subject of DNA mismatch repair came up. It turns out that, in E. coli, a very simple & widely studied prokaryote, there's a mechanism called DNA mismatch repair which fixes errors which might occur during DNA copying. If an error is detected - a mismatch (e.g. a G paired with a T) - a trio of proteins (MutL, MutS, MutH) spring into action. The original template strand is already methylated - marked with an extra methyl group - at certain points in the genome (usually where there's a C followed by a G). The daughter strand, on the other hand, is usually not methylated yet. So, one of these proteins starts running down the DNA from the mismatch site, looking for a methyl group - up to 1000 base pairs away. When it finds a site with a methyl group on one side but not the other, it nicks (marks) the daughter strand, and another protein complex comes along and chops up everything from the nick to the mismatch site. The DNA polymerase then comes by and resynthesizes the whole strand. Just three proteins are needed to drive this complex algorithm - a linear search procedure which distinguishes the mother from the daughter strand, a marking procedure which identifies the incision point, and a third to chop up the DNA and prepare it for resynthesis. What's even more bonkers is that E. coli - under stressful situations - will disable certain DNA repair mechanisms to deliberately induce more mutations. And I know that there are thousands more such pathways and complex interactions going on in cells all the time - many of which we simply haven't discovered or probed yet. I wish that everything in biology could be explained so neatly. Unfortunately, real biology is so incredibly messy. There's just so much we don't know - and so much that we can't neatly slot into an explanation like this. But, I know now that in another life I probably would have been a biologist!
  • geomark 6y ago
    "I'm very lucky that I get to learn about genetics through osmosis..." I see what you did there. But...is the genetics knowledge the solute or the solvent, because, well, you know (teaching biology to my homeschooled kid at the moment and we just did a unit on diffusion and osmosis, so please excuse my current state of mind)
• ampdepolymerase 6y ago
  Ah yes, the recurring obsession hacker news has with biology - except that no startup would pay a biologist a software engineer's wage. Talking about biology is nice. But what's nicer is dismantling the elephant in the room.
  • pm90 6y ago
    Aren’t salaries determined by the market? Just to be clear, this isn’t snark. I’m curious how salaried are determined.
    • sudosysgen 6y ago
      They are determined by the market - mostly - so how much you are paid is going to a function of how replaceable you are, and how much more money the company makes with your position filled or empty, notwithstanding dirty tricks that are somewhat rare.
    • postingpals 6y ago
      Salaries are determined by the market, but no one ever mentions how the market determines it... which is usually some combination of scarcity, quality, and, more realistically, how many connections you have, etc. These things give you bargaining power which you can use to negotiate salaries. (This is all very basic stuff but it's more fleshed out than just saying 'the market determines salary'. The market isn't a magical entity, it is run by human behaviour.)
      • klodolph 6y ago
        Yes! The market is the name of the system which sets the salary, but the name has no descriptive power. Just like the opening to the article: > I should have loved biology but I found it to be a lifeless recitation of names…
        • fennecfoxen 6y ago
          "The market" is the name of a place where, once upon a time, you would go to buy things, and perhaps sell some things you made; stable and consistent prices would emerge without any particular rules about how prices for things should be set, or any particular enforcers of the price, but by the dynamics of the supply of the good and the demand for the good.
• kernoble 6y ago
  This is why I loved biology before I learned what biology research is really like. What I wanted was to recreate life from scratch, an impossible task with todays technology; the logical sequence of steps behind our biological origins is not hard to see and become enamored with, but I will never get the satisfaction of learning all its secrets. With programming and computers this is so much closer, because these things are made my humans. Millions of man-years of effort, but still man-made. So, at least with computers I know I can learn how it's all done, and I know the steps needed to make all this technology are also known.
• hnmm23 6y ago
  I've been struggling with this same thought recently too, namely because my partner who I love so dearly is struggling with diagnoses that most physicians are just not too informed on yet, let alone the underpaid, overworked public hospital system we're dealing with. It took us years and years and years, tons of shot gun approaches by doctors with treatments, diagnoses, and medications that treat the symptoms but not the underlying cause til we finally figured out what could possibly be wrong with her! And that was only after she started working in the health field herself and had physicians and specialists that care about her take into consideration everything about her and run expensive tests. All this to say, I've been researching others' experiences with what my partner is inflicted with and those who are doing better or have some understanding had to figure a lot of it out on their own with countless medical research and studies they pore over - a lot of these success stories are from physicians inflicted with these diseases themselves! But, how am i supposed to understand the studies, and papers, and drug mechanism of action sheets? Do I start at ground 0 and start learning biology? What are some good resources? And how do I know where to go from there? All this is really troubling me and i feel so powerless.
  • arrosenberg 6y ago
    I started to reply to one of your other comments before coming to the background one. I was basically going to recommend going the university education route. I have a degree in biochem/molbio, and the topics you are interested was basically the third year of my degree. Not to discourage you (you can do anything if you want to bad enough), but they are pretty complex topics and without the foundational knowledge you are going to be saying "wait, it did what?!" a lot. I know this, because I did have all the foundational knowledge and was frequently saying that. If you have no background in biology or chemistry, I would email the authors of papers you are interested in. Most of those researchers are starved for attention and would love to break it down for you. Try making friends with one or two of the locals so they can explain more papers to you. Eventually osmosis will do its thing.
    • hnmm23 6y ago
      hmm thats understandable, ive found im met with that resistance with a LOT of questions i have about a lot of fields that you need an education to understand, yet somehow i manage(d), and will have to for now. in the immediate time being, do you have any alternative, actionable advice? topics/subjects/key people i can consider or look into that you covered your 3rd year? not saying i disagree with your comment Nor that i dont want to go the education route, trust me i would love that time and leisure, but right now my brain cant be put at ease until i understand certain things
• minhaz23 6y ago
  Beside the links provided in the article, does anyone have any other articles, books, courses, lectures, youtubers, key people, papers, journals, interesting links/talks/podcasts/quotes they'd like to share to help others on their journy to understand biology better? Thank you!
  • forgotpwagain 6y ago
    I would recommend the edX Introduction to Biology course [0]. It is a simplified version of the introductory biology course at MIT, that doesn't _focus_ on naming/defining things in biology. Instead, it uses the lenses of genetics and biochemistry to explore how the core machinery of life works, and how we got to our current understanding. That said, there is some amount of memorization that is unavoidable. [0] https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-to-biology-the-secret-of-life-3 https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-to-biology-the-secre...
  • jonsno56 6y ago
    In a Nutshell is good (not deep), though you probably already know them
  • flobosg 6y ago
    Molecular Biology of the Cell[1] is a typical recommendation. [1]: https://www.amazon.com/Molecular-Biology-Sixth-Bruce-Alberts/dp/0815345240 https://www.amazon.com/Molecular-Biology-Sixth-Bruce-Alberts...
• Upvoter33 6y ago
  This is a great article. I had the same realization some years back - this stuff is amazing! Why didn't I get into it when I had a class on it? Of course, it's easy to rail on high school classes for failing to dazzle; maybe it was just my mind not quite being ready or willing to learn. But damn, biology is amazing. How does it all work??!!
  • archgoon 6y ago
    I suspect that there is a transition, that happens after high school for some people, where the world goes from a bewildering set of disjointed arbitrary facts that need to be memorized, into comprehensible system that can be understood and behavior predicted (with sufficient effort). I also suspect that part of this is that software engineers, realizing that they can now purchase things like lab equipment and bacteria cultures, are now free to fund their own learning in their own idiosyncratic way (much like they learned to program), and not worry about burning money on something that doesn't pan out. Between this, a new confidence that the world is understandable and... debuggable, and the fact they can finance their own experiments, gives a shift in perspective that wasn't available when they were in high school.
• xingyzt 6y ago
  Note that it's not uncommon for an individual's cells to differ in DNA. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/21/science/mosaicism-dna-genome-cancer.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/21/science/mosaicism-dna-gen...
• stonogo 6y ago
  I don't know what I find more repellent about this article: the author's condescending insistence that his schoolteachers should have been better salesmen, the exhortation that biology is complex in one breath while denigrating scientists for constructing a descriptive vocabulary in the next, or (possibly worst of all) the continued erasure of Rosalind Franklin, topped off by a strong recommendation for a book on the matter whose author circled back to tack on an infamously dismissive "exoneration" of Watson and Crick.
• emmanueloga_ 6y ago
  "I should have loved biology but I found it to be a lifeless recitation of names" This is a common complaint when learning many subjects, and many teachers don't explain why the names are needed. Take music theory, it has an insane amount of vocabulary and concepts to assimilate, but if you watch any of the popular music theory videos on YouTube around these days, you get a glimpse of what mastering those terms looks like. So, extrapolating to other areas, it seems like school needs to do a much better job of explaining the focus on vocabulary. The language of Algebra, the language of Organic Chemistry, the language of Music Theory, etc, etc ... what superpowers does mastering those languages unlock? To me, watching someone work who already mastered those languages in action can be very inspiring, even if haven't reached that level of understanding yet.
  • dnautics 6y ago
    > what superpowers does mastering those languages unlock? Maybe think of it this way: it isn't unlocking the superpowers, it's an ultrafilter. If you aren't capable of performing precise and contextualized recall of trivia, then your engagement with the subject is going to be limited to diletanttery. When I was a biochemist, there were several critical instances when recall of some minor thing that I had learned years or even a decade ago, sometimes even an offhanded comment in a journal club, enabled debugging a situation where there wouldn't have been time to "go to the library" much less even know where to start looking. I know it's fiction, but think about the show House. Would House have been as effective if he didn't have an encyclopedia of knowledge at his fingertips? You have to be able to not just think about things from first principles BUT ALSO literally have indexable fast-access knowledge. Since you bring up music theory, in jazz, it's one thing to know the theory of what a 2-5-1 pattern is, but if you don't have it in your fingers, you are not going to be able to make good music, imagine a jazz pianist constantly searching the keyboard for the correct notes.
    • kortilla 6y ago
      House was effective because the writers made him that way. The real top people in fields are not walking encyclopedias. They have extremely good grasps of core principles, key findings, relationships between ideas, etc. Specific names and other specifics that don’t fundamentally affect things are not things they clutter their minds with.
• joshuamcginnis 6y ago
  After 15 years in tech and a life-changing psychedelic trip, I decided to self-learn genetic engineering and share it with the world[1][2] while I look for a meaningful biotech venture to found. What you can do today from your kitchen or home lab is remarkable. For instance, I taught myself PCR (polymerase chain reaction) and recently published my first genetic sequence at GenBank from fungi that I cultured, extracted, sequenced and aligned. I'm planning to have developed my first GMO yeast in the next 90 days. If you're interested, I also host the EverymanBio Podcast (YouTube & iTunes) where I talk to folks doing incredible work in the biotech / startup / diybio community. [1] http://everymanbio.com/ http://everymanbio.com/ [2] https://www.instagram.com/everymanbio/ https://www.instagram.com/everymanbio/ [3] https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuamcginnis/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuamcginnis/
  • axiom92 6y ago
    >life-changing psychedelic trip Fascinating stuff. Any chance you could expand on this?
    • joshuamcginnis 6y ago
      I suffer from pretty bad depression and have been battling with it for a while using all available treatments. Someone recommended I try psilocybin mushrooms. I learned how to grow them, grew them and then had my wife help facilitate a safe well-intentioned trip using 7g of dried mushrooms. Happy to answer any questions about it. It was a profound experience. It isn't a cure but it's certainly a tool in my toolbox that has helped reshaped my life in a real and lasting way.
      • neitherboosh 6y ago
        Wonderful to hear it’s had such a positive impact on your life. What part of the experience made you decide to learn about genetic engineering?
        • joshuamcginnis 6y ago
• koeng 6y ago
  I started out in computers, spent most my career in biotechnology, and right now spend about half and half in each (for the most part, I run a DNA cloning foundry where I clone new sequences. Need lots of software for that). If there is one takeaway from working in both fields, I think it is that a lot of computer scientists believe their systems are deep - it is nothing compared to biology. Biotechnology also has a fundamentally different culture than tech, and so there can be some culture shock between the two. This is improving - I think the author would have loved synthetic biology :)
• b34r 6y ago
  Given the mutable global state nature of biology, this actually seems like a perfect target to apply machine learning to essentially try trillions of combinations in parallel to uncover ideal states. Once we know the ideal states of cells that eliminate disease and optimize bodily function, we can reverse engineer the precision medicines to “tweak” the chemical balance of cells.
• awinter-py 6y ago
  this is my favorite blogger his 'there's a gold rush on and I'm the shovel' article about his decision to leave programming for writing has always stuck with me and nothing he's written since then has betrayed that voice (especially the post on 'you're using the wrong dictionary')
  • ftruzzi 6y ago
    Is this it? Very interesting, thank you. https://aeon.co/essays/dad-s-company-made-burgers-mine-just-eats-them https://aeon.co/essays/dad-s-company-made-burgers-mine-just-...
• xrd 6y ago
  I love this article. Does anyone have suggestions on starting down this path as someone that understands programming but has forgotten all the high school biology I learned? I love the way I can now learn new programming frameworks. Read small bit by bit projects that build up slowly and teach the important components. Svelte for example. Solving problems and practicing the techniques are the best way for me to memorize things and then apply them to my own projects. Is there anything similar that could start me down this path? I'm less interested in videos like the Ninja Nerd. They look great, but it isn't a way of learning that sticks with me.
  • koeng 6y ago
    What are you interested in? Synthetic biology? Bioinformatics? Something else? Biology is really broad - As an analogy, not sure if you’re interested in how to build a gaming computer or want to learn how make web apps.
    • xrd 6y ago
      I don't know. Which of those is the most fun? I suppose I don't care as much about building something or a career as much as I want to learn something new. Can you suggest a focus for me?
      • koeng 6y ago
        A book I loved when I was first learning is called “Unraveling DNA” from 1988. I remember it reading like a detective novel, as back then the folks writing were mentored by the OG molecular biology folks. It can be yours for only $4 https://www.amazon.com/Unraveling-DNA-Maxim-D-Frank-Kamenetskii/dp/1560816171 https://www.amazon.com/Unraveling-DNA-Maxim-D-Frank-Kamenets... “A genetic switch” is another fantastic unraveling of a single virus. If you like diving into like a framework and learning piece by piece how it all works slowly, that is a GREAT book. For a while this was my favorite book. https://www.amazon.com/Biology-Viruses-Bruce-Phd-Voyles/dp/0801663911 https://www.amazon.com/Biology-Viruses-Bruce-Phd-Voyles/dp/0... This book started my career. The first chapter, specifically, started my career. It got me hooked, not sure why. You can learn about other WILD things viruses do there too! On the experimentation side, try a transformation kit https://www.the-odin.com/colorbacteria/ https://www.the-odin.com/colorbacteria/ it’s $30, and at least you’d be able to tell friends and family you’ve genetically modified life before. That is a nice intro into synthetic biology. This is how I got started. On the bioinformatics side, miniPCR has some nice kits to go barcode environmental strains. I personally hate doing PCR and don’t care about barcoding, so I’m biased here. I’m much more of a synthetic biologist, so bioinformatics study is only relevant to me in context of the things above. I’d probably buy some books + the transformation kit and then see what interests you from there. There are a couple things that are 1 step away from transformation kit plus some learning, which is why I recommend that path.
• zelly 6y ago
  Big problem with the field of biology, like Peter Thiel says, is it's the science field people go into to avoid math.
  • jmiskovic 6y ago
    I was thinking similar thing while reading through the article. The school system does the selection of mindsets and sets the stage for whole discipline. The approach for intro classes seems to be absorbing textbook material, and not curious mind doing investigation. It may change later on, but the filtering of students is already done by that time. I wouldn't say that biologists avoid math without some data to support that. Just that schooling system is doing huge disservice to biology field by ignoring scientific method in early education stages.
• achenatx 6y ago
  I have microbiology and electrical engineering degrees. Started a PhD (microbiology and immunology) and washed out with a masters to go into the dot com boom. There is so much potential for biology to be engineering, but the reality is you can spend your whole life studying one tiny aspect of something esoteric. You can spend your whole life trying to find one amazing cure (or not). Biology is great if you are interested in learning how the world works, but not so great if you love to create new things. Even with medicine you are essentially a mechanic for humans instead of cars and the technology improves a lot slower. I considered doing bioinformatics, but there was essentially no way to make money because grad students were doing everything for 12K/year. One great thing about biology is that it is easy to understand because everything makes sense and "works" like you think it should. Human created systems often times dont make sense at all.
  • koeng 6y ago
    Synthetic biology is pretty good for creating things. Agree with other points tho
  • loosetypes 6y ago
    > One great thing about biology is that it is easy to understand because everything makes sense and "works" like you think it should. Human created systems often times dont make sense at all. Interesting. I tend to view it as the opposite. Someone else’s system might not be created using the abstractions I would have chosen but with enough head scratching you can generally at least surmise causality. And with computer systems, you can test and re-run until there’s a grain of certainty. With biology there’s so many independent moving pieces that it feels, to me, like our explanations of molecular and cellular processes are almost certainly lacking an encompassing view. And using them to explain macro biological phenomenon borders astrology. Sure our, experiments tell us something but we interpret results as rules while neglecting the wider context. I don’t want to project onto others but I don’t think my brain is equipped to understand the emergent processes at that scope of nested, interdependent, hierarchies. If you thought object-oriented programming was bad!...
  • cblconfederate 6y ago
    > One great thing about biology is that it is easy to understand because everything makes sense and "works" like you think it should. Human created systems often times dont make sense at all. That's probably because people choose to test only the most obvious hypotheses. There s an amazing amount of data but it s mostly at the level of "describing the clouds". there seems to be a need for theoretical breakthroughs
• lambdatronics 6y ago
  Reminds me of The Vital Question by Nick Lane. I highly recommend this book. I had that same sensation reading it: "Man, why was high school biology so boring when it could have been like this?!" It's about the role of energy in the emergence of life (pre-biotic -> single-cell -> multicellular -> animals). You'll see some chemical names, but it also tells interesting human stories too.
• skybrian 6y ago
  Perhaps more interesting than learning that "every cell in my body has the same DNA" is learning that they don't. Many mutations aren't repaired and the result is "mosaicism" which turns out to be more common than was once thought, particularly for neurons since they are so long-lived: Scientists Surprised to Find No Two Neurons Are Genetically Alike https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientists-surprised-to-find-no-two-neurons-are-genetically-alike/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientists-surpri...
• vfinn 6y ago
  Inspiring. His message doesn't apply only to biology. Several subjects in schools are teached in an uninteresting manner that doesn't captivate the students, and so they don't learn, and so they rather hate school. Memorization of the wrong type of things for the sake of tests should end. We should focus more on what sticks with people.
  • the_only_law 6y ago
    Science, and biology in particular, was one of the few subjects I actually did enjoy growing up. I could occasionally be found reading some random books related to the subject. Of course, one of the things that ultimately lead to me doing software, was that it was something I could do "real" work in my own home without a ton of extremely expensive equipment not available to the general public, and immerse myself in it, which is more than I can say for most of the things that have captured my interest.
• stef25 6y ago
  Before reading the article I started writing a comment about how during a 1st year genetics class at university I was amazed at the software and hardware (for lack of better terms) involved in DNA replication are mind blowing. Now I see the author makes the comparison to a Lisp program. Also wanted to mention the differentiation of cells in an embryo (how the f*ck can that even work ... not in a lab, but our own bodies?!) - it's explained really well in "The Gene" (hormonal gradients in the embryonic fluid). Author also mentions this. Natural selection ... is our DNA some kind of cosmic RAM memory that stores all this information over millions of years? The other day I went to get my hearing checked and the doc explained to me how sound is captured by the ear drum and transferred to the brain through a few bones and along hairs & nerves. It's basic high school stuff but if you take a step back and think about how this mechanism makes us perceive the beauty of our favorite sounds (music, hearing our children laugh), how complex it must actually be and that this ... "evolved", out of a cosmic chemical soup, it's just incomprehensible. Biology, genes, brains are nothing short of amazing. I'm not a religious person but if something points to the existence of a god then you'll find it in biology.
• Sophistifunk 6y ago
  This isn't just biology, it's school. The only time you're taught processes and methods, it's when they're busywork, and you're wasting a year memorising how to do something nobody does any more because we have computers and calculators. What you're being taught is to squash your individuality, demand and follow orders, and to seek your worth only in the approval of your betters. But most of all, you're being kept out of the house so that both your parents can go back to jobs they don't like.
  • etripe 6y ago
    You made me exhale in amusement at this comment, because it is true to a degree. Do you think most people don't actually mind this kind of education? I'm asking because I'm baffled this is the way education seems to work in most places and has done for ages . I also assume that something would eventually change if enough people disagreed. Or might it be because that is still how we think about the employer-employee relationship and the latter's duties - follow orders and ignore your individuality?
    • rimliu 6y ago
      I think that comment just reflects the current thinking that you can have something without putting any effort.
      • Bjartr 6y ago
        I think this comment reflects the current thinking that the amount of effort is intrinsically tied to attained value.
      • Sophistifunk 6y ago
        I certainly wasn't saying that, nor do I think it. I don't see what it has do to with the topic at all.
    • watwut 6y ago
      Education is actually changing all the time. There are some efforts to improve it in general, improve it for selected groups (disabled) and periodical efforts to dismantle and destroy its public form entirely.
• pdm55 6y ago
  Sometimes companies that sell proteins, enzymes, antibodies, etc. have good educational resources. I came across this company blog the other day: https://blog.cellsignal.com/ https://blog.cellsignal.com/ They also have diagrams of the internal structure of cells. Maybe, one day, they will add explanations beyond the succinct labels that they presently have: https://www.cellsignal.com/contents/science/cellular-landscapes/science-landscapes https://www.cellsignal.com/contents/science/cellular-landsca...
• ramraj07 6y ago
  I resonate greatly with this article and am inspired to do something that I've been putting off for a long time, which is to start a youtube channel explaining cell/molecular biology/immunology topics to general public. What would some interesting questions to tackle first in such a channel?
• orobinson 6y ago
  I’ve always wondered why I found Biology less interesting than Physics or Chemistry at school and this article certainly hits the nail on the head. However I think in more recent years I’ve come to appreciate it at as an interesting subject. The same goes for History. I think another root cause is modern schooling does a pretty terrible job of teaching a passion for learning (unless of course you’re lucky enough to have some amazing teachers). I didn’t really completely discover the joy of learning until I did my degree and since then I’ve had a renewed interest in subjects I paid less attention to in school because the thought of learning new things excites me a whole lot more than it used to.
• neurostimulant 6y ago
  I was always into computers stuff since I was young, but biology always give we a feeling of wonder and excitement. In high school I always planned to enter the Informatics Olympiad (there are multitude of Science Olympiad in high school where you compete on city level, then regional state/province lever, then nationally and ultimately on international level). Instead, I got hooked into biology and ended up competing on the Biology Olympiad all the way into the International Biology Olympiad. When people asked me why a person that loves computer like me is getting into biology so much, my answer is how come anyone not getting crazy over biology? The rabbit hole is so deep, I can't help but dig and dig just to satisfy my curiosity. When people heard about biology they always imagine endless recitation on taxonomy and stuff but like the author wrote, that's not what biology is all about. Alas, I ended up not having a career in biology-related field though. I'm a programmer through-and-through. But I did meet my wife through these event so it's not all for nothing, and I still like biology.
• watwut 6y ago
  > Someone probably told me that every cell in my body has the same DNA. But no one shook me by the shoulders, saying how crazy that was. Why is that crazy? I had years when I liked biology and years when I did not liked it, but imo, the wish for mystification does not lead to knowledge. Well done any topic can be interesting, badly done it will be boring. But, that wish to have everything framed in mystique is something I cant comprehend or really stand by. Like, I did not wanted to be manipulated that way as a kid and teachers who overdone it came across as untrustworthy or pathetic.
• known 6y ago
  Biology was my first love; But I ended as Computer hacker :)
• teekert 6y ago
  I did love Biology and I always stopped to ponder how insane it is, just on my own. And I became a biologist. I can tell you it never stops to be amazing. For example after your jaw has dropped after you realized all cells have the same DNA, imagine where your jaw goes when you learn the implication of every cell having 2 meters of DNA! And the right parts are always accessible to the right cell at the right time. It's beautiful. Over time I learned that if you can imagine some process, it's likely you'll find it somewhere in biology (keep the laws of physics in mind though ;)).
• jmiskovic 6y ago
  Great article. It covers many grounds - failings of school system, great reading recommendations, glimpse of biologist methods and inspirations for future tools. I thought the last part would resonate more with HN crowd. We have means and opportunity to build better tools for visualizing and communicating complex diagrams. Is anyone working on something similar?
• vagrantJin 6y ago
  Most people don't because biology is hard.
• madrox 6y ago
  Of course Feynman had something to say about this: "You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing — that's what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something." I knew this intuitively at a very young age, which made me a poor public school student. Unfortunately, there are some subjects that are easy to learn on your own, and some that are only easy with a good teacher. Biology is one of the latter. However, that may be different these days.
  • svara 6y ago
    He's making an interesting point that's largely true, but not the whole truth. It's the typical physicist arrogance towards biology. ;) For example, evolution through natural selection would not have been understood if Darwin and Wallace hadn't put great effort into cataloguing and classifying species. You might say they obviously were thinking about mechanisms at the same time, but the cataloguing was the precondition to their later insights. They built on the foundations set by, amongst others, Linnaeus, who's main contribution to the field was a classification of living things.
    • infinite8s 6y ago
      The same was true of physics (for example, Tycho Brahe's extensive astronomical measurements paved the way for Copernicus's heliocentrism model and Newton's later theories of mechanics).
      • whatshisface 6y ago
        Brahe's measurements weren't classifications, they were measurements. Physics-through-classification dates back to the failed attempts of ancient philosophers to explain the natural world. They had ideas like, "there are two kinds of things, things that fall down, and things that do not. The things that fall fall because they are things-that-fall." The present-day bad blood that physicists have towards taxonomies probably has something to do with the fact that their field was founded the day physics taxonomies were abandoned.
• locallost 6y ago
  He's right, but it's also hard. He wants to be amazed, but being amazed also depends on your interest and level of knowledge at the time. And also the approach and skill of the teacher. In my age I've learned that I'm a pretty bad teacher, and I can tell most people are really bad at it also. Even if you're a good teacher, in a class of 20, your approach will not be optimal for all: some will not understand, for some it will be too easy and boring, and for some it will be just right. His complaint about calculating the surface of a triangle is fair, but actually I do remember that in 5th/6th grade we had to derive things like the height of an even sided triangle give the length of the side, and subsequently the surface. But the Pythagorean theorem was kind of just given. Is there a way to provide a proof that children will understand and thus understand better in general? I think that's really non trivial (and I hope people are working on it).
• wombatmobile 6y ago
  Biology is awesome! But yeah, you might never get into it if it were taught to you as dry mumbo jumbo, like Type 4 secretion system: ii- Pilus biogenesis That's why they invented computer visualisations. Check out the molecular apparatus on the surface of the bacterium. It uses it to inject DNA into another nearby bacterium! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihlFqOK5cZM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihlFqOK5cZM
• Rochus 6y ago
  This is about molecular biology, which is only one of many branches of biology. The biggest books I ever bought were those on molecular biology and biochemistry. Huge and weighing several kilos. Until then I did not know that it was possible to produce such large paperbacks at all. Some of these books are also among the best I have ever seen in terms of design and didactics. This is also necessary because the area is so big that you can easily spend several lives with it. I agree with the author that molecular biology is neglected in school or is often not taught in a very motivating way. But this is true for many fields of knowledge, not only for molecular biology. My entry into the field was when I did a PhD in molecular biology and biophysics after ten years of professional experience as a computer scientist. That was almost twenty years ago now, and I still have the feeling that I'm only scratching the surface.
  • Melting_Harps 6y ago
    > My entry into the field was when I did a PhD in molecular biology and biophysics after ten years of professional experience as a computer scientist. That was almost twenty years ago now, and I still have the feeling that I'm only scratching the surface. Wait... I know there are cross-disciplines that let you get into certain programs, but you skipped and entire undergrad's worth of core classes in Biology, Chemistry, Biochemistry and Physics (and possibly Masters level research) and got into a Molecular Biology PhD program with 10 years as a CS? That really is amazing, and kind of disheartening as a person with a BSc in Cellular/Molecular biology. Goes to show just how irrelevant it really way in the grand-scheme of things--though, to be honest I had already had that thought as I was doing it. I actually double majored as a Bio-Chem major but never went past my junior year requirements for it, and was never even given the option to have my completed lower division course work be deemed as a minor when I graduated. And, yes you are right; once you understand how immense the field is and how wide reaching it is, you cannot fathom being able to ever really grasp it in one Lifetime. It's an amazing field of study, but despite my credentials saying a concentration in Molecular Biology I honestly had a much greater fascination in Microbiology and the role it has on Human and Plant Health and disease and the correlation between the two via diet.
    • 6y ago
• srom 6y ago
  I am currently self-learning biology and I just completed MIT's 7.00x introduction to biology on edX [1]. The course is outstanding and anything but a "lifeless recitation of names". Prof Eric Lander (key researcher on the Human Genome Project) goes through two centuries of research and takes the time to explain how and why discoveries came into existence. It goes from the early days of biochemistry to recent major advancement such as CRISPR/Cas9. I'm looking to apply my ML expertise to the field of biology and this course was a real windfall, I highly recommend it. [1] https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-to-biology-the-secret-of-life-3 https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-to-biology-the-secre...
• olau 6y ago
  Biology is awesome! I have an older sister who majored in biology long time ago. The some time later while visiting her I borrowed one of her university books (introduction to zoology or something like that). It was actually written in the style suggested here, and yes, it was just amazing to read about people having studied and eked out mysteries of life. For instance, why do you have a front side? I think I ended up reading 5 of her books. If you're the kind of person who could pick up a book on physics just because you're curious about the world, this will definitely appeal to you.
  • alok-g 6y ago
    Can you please look up the name/author of the book(s). "Introduction to Zoology" is too generic to be able to spot the one you are recommending. Thanks.
• ricardo81 6y ago
  When I first got into web building I created biology-online.org, about 21 years ago (it originated on some free hosting space). Managed to get it ranking #1 for "biology" and a number of relevant terms, mainly because an eminent Harvard page was linking to it. At that time I could put ads on the page to effectively make it a full time job developing the site, which I did. It was massively rewarding knowing that 5000 people a day were reading something I wrote. I'd like to think someone managed to get their degree/job based on stuff they learned on there. My personal belief is that biodiversity and preserving it should be one of our top priorities this century, nature has inspired a lot of our ideas and there's going to be many more. For all our advancements, we're just part of a larger tapestry. Great subject.
• faichai 6y ago
  One of the simple things that my secondary school biology failed to explain was enzymes. They were presented as these mythical entities that magically reduce the energy requirements of certain reactions, using a clumsy key/lock metaphor that didn’t really explain anything. It was much later in my 30s after buying a book on cellular biology that I learnt that enzymes work by using electro-static forces to bend target molecules to increase their probability of breaking at lower energies. It’s this pattern of +ve and -ve charges on the enzyme that matches the target molecule and provides the basis of the key/lock metaphor. This realisation was so beautiful, astonishing and illuminating that I can’t for the life of me understand why it was left out, particularly as we were learning about the physics and chemistry of the related concepts anyway.
• wombatmobile 6y ago
  Those books recommended in the article look good but are expensive. The Machinery of Life, David Goodsell A Computer Scientist’s Guide to Cell Biology, William W. Cohen
• kls 6y ago
  The author pretty much summed up the epiphany I had, which was pretty much "Holy crap, that is a self contained biological programming language" It got a lot more interesting for me when I had that aha moment.
• xwdv 6y ago
  Many of the experiments I would love to do in biology are probably unethical, perhaps it is better that I went into tech, where a lack of ethics doesn’t necessarily equate to direct harm to a living thing.
• kashyapc 6y ago
  Speaking of biology ... I'm about 60% through the 720-page tome, 'Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst' by Robert Sapolsky. "Electrifying" indeed, as a blurb at the back of the book puts it. The narrative structure is quite compelling, where Sapolsky starts by examining a behavior in the present and gradually zooms out, all the way back to evolutionary factors from millennia ago. The book also provides helpful primers on neuroscience, endocrinology (important to understand the impact of hormones), and proteins. Take a good three months to read it; really. So far my only quibble is that Sapolsky cites the infamous "priming" study from 'Thinking, Fast and Slow', which the author, Daniel Kahneman, himself has retracted it elsewhere. This is forgivable, as the retraction from Kahneman (Feb 2017) and the release of 'Behave' (May 2017) were too close. Though I'll keep an eye for other transgressions. Regardless of my quibbling, 'Behave' has so far been an exhilarating read; it covers an insane amount of ground, all while not losing sight of its goal—a better understanding of human nature. Don't let the page count discourage you—you'll quickly warm up to Sapolsky's loquacious writing style, peppered with tasteful humor and a deep love for science. And don't skip the footnotes; plenty of interesting bits in there. (Get the hardcover edition if you can, it's much less unwieldy during back-and-forth flipping, among other benefits.)
  • PennRobotics 6y ago
    His lectures on Youtube are incredible. It was one of my favorite courses to watch---on par with Donald Sadoway, Anant Agarwal, David Malan and Walter Lewin. I'd also note, when he gave his lectures, he was clear that the neurons in our brain are like those of most other creatures, and there were simply more with better specialization through complex arrangements. With the recent discovery of the rosehip neuron, this idea might not be entirely true. A handful of his other thoughts are also on the border of truth (such as bringing up the study with some outrageous percentage of misattributed paternity in Europe). Still, almost everything he describes is insightful and captivating, and he seems to convey that science is full of nuance and there's so much undiscovered in the world.
• FrankyHollywood 6y ago
  Same can be said for almost any high-school class. In physics and mathematics you learn mostly tricks to get at an answer for a question, where the sole purpose of the question is entertaining students. Only in my 20s I read biography's from people like Feynman (1) and Erdös (2). Great reads! Really make you exited about math or physics. I wonder if high-school teachers even know these persons. And if they do, why not talk about them? (1) Surely you're joking mr Feynman (2) The man who loved only numbers
• leto_ii 6y ago
  > In the textbooks, astonishing facts were presented without astonishment. Someone probably told me that every cell in my body has the same DNA. But no one shook me by the shoulders, saying how crazy that was. The key thought of the article comes right at the top. The distance between the astonishing nature of reality and the dry tedious way it's taught to people is present in all subjects, but seems greatest in biology. What seems to always be missing is what Chomsky calls a 'willingness to be puzzled'. In fact I think this ability to be puzzled or amazed is there to begin with, but is beaten out of us by the educational system.
• bartread 6y ago
  > I should have loved biology but I found it to be a lifeless recitation of names: the Golgi apparatus and the Krebs cycle; mitosis, meiosis; DNA, RNA, mRNA, tRNA. This opening sentence resonated hard with me. For reasons now too obscure to go into I decided to study biochemistry at university and whilst, at the time, it sounded like it should be exciting, what I found instead was that it was substantially an uninspiring exercise in memorization from beginning to end. No interesting general principles or profound insights. I hated it. Not exactly from the beginning, but certainly after the first year novelty wore off, and I despised it ever more as time went on. In the end - surprise, surprise - I didn't do that brilliantly. A total waste of time but sometimes you only learn by making quite expensive mistakes. I probably would have been a lot happier had I studied physics, or even maths, or - as I ended up converting into with a post-grad masters, and thankfully I at least managed to do well enough to qualify for that course - computer science.
• VonBlue 6y ago
  When I was in my AP Calc class in high school, the teacher began by explaining what a derivative was. He drew a picture with a curve, drew a line across two points on that curve, and explained that the derivative is the slope of that line as the two points get closer and closer together. We knew how to calculate a slope, so it was easy to build on that knowledge and take it further. It’s been 20 years and I can still do this, after having seen it that one time. I don’t know if this way of teaching derivatives is unique, but it felt like a far cry from memorization, even back then. It was effective because it was visual, because it explained something intuitively, and because it added a small piece of information to an existing foundation of knowledge. Incidentally, the only things I remember from biology are pictures, or the demonstration that a teacher made when someone “stretched” her “intestines” across the room.
• codecaveman 6y ago
  "Enormous subjects are best approached in thin, deep slices" - this one clicked for me. I mean why this is not the way the education goes? I think its not optimal strategy just to force people memorize random facts without seeing big picture. Why go suboptimal route?
• k__ 6y ago
  In school I was good at physics and chemistry, but bad at biology and history. I have the feeling it being "a lifeless recitation of names" was the reason, yes.
• FrankyHollywood 6y ago
  life is a "a big slop of global mutable state" :)
• felnasire 6y ago
  This is why people like Neil Degrasse Tyson and Carl Sagan are such a treasure. Our education system rewards memorization so that's what teachers focus on, but guys like them make you actually realize how crazy our universe is. This is also why we should legalize and regulate psychedelics for safe consumption.
  • HopDavid 6y ago
    Tyson's an entertaining bull shitter. It's easier to be entertaining when you have no need for rigor and accuracy. See biologist PZ Myers comment on Tyson: https://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2016/03/17/some-days-its-very-hard-to-defend-neil-degrasse-tyson https://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2016/03/17/some-days-its...
• iron0013 6y ago
  The whiz-pow fun explanations for phenomena are great for the first 101 class in a subject, but any subject—especially biology—is so huge that at some point you must buckle down and learn quickly and efficiently, without so many fun little anecdotes.
• julius_set 6y ago
  A lot of it is tied to the dog and pony show that is pre-med. You have 90% of the class interested in going to Medical/Dental school. So most students are NOT interested in the WHY but the How can I get an A.
• deleted 6y ago
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• dekhn 6y ago
  As a computer nerd in high school, a teacher gave us a Scientific American article about molecular biology- you know, the central dogma and things downstream. I read it. It took me days- I had to read each paragraph slowly, and understood what it said before I could proceed. It seemed really neat- like being put in front of a computer with no manual and being asked to document how it works. I continued to pursue biology in undergrad, learning some excellent underlying basis (that Roche Biochemistry pathways poster? I had it memorized by the end of my junior year) and getting some experience in the new field of sequence analysis (at the time, E.Coli was being sequenced, and you could FTP the new sequences when the showed up on the server). I worked with some very early machine learning in '95 to build gene classifiers. This seemed like a good area to work in ("molecular biologists make $70K/year!") so I went to grad school and continued to learn deep biology and work in computational biology along with some wet lab work (whcih I'm terrible at). Postdoc as well- I was on my way to being a Professor of Biology. But, realistically, I couldn't compete with high end postdocs and decided instead to go into industry as a computer scientist. I've still dabbled in biology- my long term passion is still to build a warehouse-scale biology lab with a tightly coupled robotic experiment framework and machine learning system to do automated biology. A number of people are working in this area and all failing, but writing wonderful PR that makes it sound like they're solving the world's problems. Biology has a huge hype problem- remember when it was promised that genomics was going to cure all human diseases? I've dropped all biology and returned to computers (with some hardware hacking). It's a real relief- everything makes sense, the engineering is straightforward, you can do it in your garage without contaminating all your surfaces.
  • koeng 6y ago
    Should check out Opentrons! I run a couple out of my home lab and they're great for automating biotech procedures. You can get 90% the way to full automation with like 10% the cost.
• LockAndLol 6y ago
  This virology course (1) made me start taking courses on Khan academy to understand cells (I don't) and DNA. There really are few occasions in life that remind me of my years as a child giddy to understand how things work and I'm glad I found that virology course. This blog post strikes a cord with me. My anguish for the worldwide state of education is abysmal. School and university are necessary, but the goal isn't to make us curious and wonder about things or excited to learn. The education system packages us up for work and is heavily focused on knowledge, not understanding. If you fail school, or uni - or look like you failed - people think you're dumb and unintelligent. You can be lucky sometimes and get a teacher who's actually passionate about their subject AND is able to teach. Most teachers and professors I had were just I'm the system and mentally done. I can't blame most of them. The salary is often miserable, the curriculum bad, the books boring, administration annoying and the parents... good grief. Of course some really shouldn't have become teachers or let near kids, but that's the minority. Anyway, I'm really glad the pandemic happened. Studying biology and physics at home has been rewarding and highly interesting. If only school and uni were/had been the same... (1): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGhmZX2NKiNldpyRUBBEzNoWL0Cso1jip https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGhmZX2NKiNldpyRUBBEz...
• anm89 6y ago
  The thing that drove this home for me were the biovisions animations which got me to go back and basically learn high school biology. Seeing the mechanical nature of gene transciption and chemical signaling blew my mind. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Hk9jct2ozY&t=170 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Hk9jct2ozY&t=170 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQmTKxI4Wn4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQmTKxI4Wn4 On the other hand, I don't buy his thing about wishing his high school teacher had presented it differently. No on else can make you interested in this stuff. The best they can do is provide resources like the ones above.
  • alok-g 6y ago
    These are simply a Wow!! Mind blowing, as you said.
• acomjean 6y ago
  There are some community biology groups: things like this in the boston area.. They have talks, offer classes, have some equipment and such. BOSlabs in cambridge MA is one such. I'm sure there are lots of others. https://www.boslab.org/about https://www.boslab.org/about
• sjg007 6y ago
  This is a great blog post. Lots of great startup ideas in it. Nice to see it connecting across disciplines and domains. Also a great explication of how technology drives discovery.
• nahuel0x 6y ago
  computing will become biology and biology will become computing.
• Rastonbury 6y ago
  This resonates with me, I like solving problems in chemistry and physics, like I like calculating stuff. Biology on the other hand was pure memorisation in high school. That's why I elected to do chemistry for my A-level and not biology despite doing always doing slightly better in biology before that. I just really disliked rote memorisation.