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Another story in a similar vein. There are many, many stories about how the advent of DNA sequencing would finally solve the issues of creating the tree of life
by xipho 5y ago
Another story in a similar vein. There are many, many stories about how the advent of DNA sequencing would finally solve the issues of creating the tree of life for all species on Earth, and solve the problem of defining species boundaries, this was some 20 years ago or more. We're still nowhere close thanks largely to the unimaginable quantity of biodiversity out there. We have the low-hanging fruit genomes (specimens readily available, known to be commercially important, etc), but that's about it. Even with those "genomes" (most are not curated to any real level of completion) we still haven't solved compute at scale, even small analyses (10k terminals, 2k genes) take months if not years to comprehensively run (i.e. explore parameter spaces), albeit thanks in part to limits on resources available to scientists.
The Earth is big and complex, I can't see the singularity on the horizon yet, but my vision is aging.
- dekhn 5y agoI solved the computational problem for genomics already, since it's a mostly-embarassingly-parallel problem (in paticular, I made an idle cycle harvester at Google that applied 1+M xeon cores to science problems, one of which was genomic assembly). I don't know that creating super-accurate species trees is really the most important problem to solve in biology, though. Certainly DNA sequencing for health has been a really mixed bag.
- xipho 5y agoNice work with that solution! I did similar! I solved the earth's hunger issues, funny thing is we produce enough food, we just can't deploy it to the people who need it. Problem is I can't figure out the logistics of how to make it work... I think maybe you have the same problem? We should compare notes.
- t_serpico 5y agolol
- xipho 5y ago> Certainly DNA sequencing for health has been a really mixed bag. Ah, the old why bother since it's a "mixed bag" argument. If it wasn't a mixed bag I'd be really worried, as someone has some pretty good snake oil. I vaguely recall something about sequencing and its role in creating a vaciine that turned out to be pretty useful, something recent maybe?
- dekhn 5y agoI don't have a complaint about sequencing that leads to vaccines. That's what sequencing is for. What i'm troubled by is the projects that sequence a million people, using $1B to do so, and then just dump a bunch of genomes with some hand-wavy claims about how it's going to cure cancer. The costs here are rathre significant, but the health outcomes are not.
- rayiner 5y agoAnother example. An airplane broke the sound barrier in 1948. Today, we are as far removed from Yeager breaking the sound barrier as Yeager was from a civil war hero being President (Grant). But we still have no supersonic airplanes in commercial service.
- notahacker 5y agotbf, lack of supersonic airplanes is a commercial problem rather than a technical one. On the other hand, most of the commercial jets we do fly are basically 1950s designs with bigger engines and some computers in the cockpit, and HN thinks it was crazily irresponsible for Boeing to have decided to use sensor-triggered autonomous systems to do something as simple as temporarily adjust the trim system...
- Dylan16807 5y agoIt was irresponsible to use one sensor to adjust the trim in a not-very-visible way.