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I should have loved biology (2020)

• barfard 2y ago
  [dead]
• pfdietz 2y ago
  There is no date on that? (He says it was from his blog, but it's not actually in the blog.)
  • AlotOfReading 2y ago
    The page was first archived in November 2020, so probably thereabouts.
    • arduanika 2y ago
      Discussion at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25136422 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25136422
  • jeffhwang 2y ago
    From the article, "A few months ago, I started a magazine assignment to answer some questions about SARS-CoV-2 and the immune system. I encountered paragraphs like this"... and the author links to this this [1] New Yorker article about COVID that was published November 2020. So from context clues, was probably published in late 2020. [1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/11/09/how-the-coronavirus-hacks-the-immune-system https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/11/09/how-the-corona...
• kwhitefoot 2y ago
  One might just as easily wonder why they needed to be told to have a sense of wonder.
• Baeocystin 2y ago
  A genuinely engaging read. Thank you for posting it here.
  • firebirdn99 2y ago
    James Somers is awesome. Every now and then, I see another of his articles that comes up here. Really great writer, who didn't set out to be one, but switched from a career in tech I believe.
• grzeshru 2y ago
  I sympathize with the author even if my gripe is different. I’m surrounded by people who read pop science and regurgitate things they have no clue nor conception of. It’s very difficult to have an honest discussion and to ask “what if?” and say “interesting, I don’t know” with people who read books and think they have it figured out because so—and-so said so. I should have loved curiosity, but what I’ve found are people looking to justify existing thinking.
  • KingOfLechia 2y ago
    [dead]
  • CoastalCoder 2y ago
    > I should have loved curiosity, but what I’ve found are people looking to justify existing thinking. Do you find yourself subject to that as well? If so, have you found a way to mitigate it?
• echelon 2y 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. You just had bad teachers. The subject is all at once beautiful, bizarre, fascinating, daunting, mysterious, majestic, labyrinthine, and awe-inspiring. We are solutions along a physical, biogeochemical optimization gradient. We're fit to the world around us like a glove. We're also distributed systems. Every sub-component of every single one of our cells is a computational system in flux, dynamically adjusting to trillions of inputs every single second. Even the packing of "junk DNA" is a calculated encoding of spatiotemporal expression dynamics and far downstream behavior. We are the universe encoding behavior unto itself. Exchanging gasses, assembling polymers, replicating, carefully kept in balance. Battling against other systems attempting to utilize the same energy gradients. > I think we also need inspiration. There is a romance in biology, as in any other science, that a movie like Good Will Hunting could bring out. We need heroes. Whoever delivers us from this pandemic in the form of a slam dunk vaccine, or a cheap quick reliable test, should become a household name, not for their own glory but for our kids—a Feynman for them to dream about someday becoming. Biology doesn't have the rockets or the fancy computers, but it stands to one day unlock some of the best things for humanity: a world free of diseases, long lives, and perhaps one day, even immortality. The only reason it's not sexier is that it's still in the punch card phases. We're just starting to scratch the surface of the computers that make up ourselves.
  • ArtsiomH 2y ago
    > You just had bad teachers. The subject is all at once beautiful, bizarre, fascinating, daunting, mysterious, majestic, labyrinthine, and awe-inspiring. This. I'd say it applies to a lot, If not all subjects. In my experience teachers rarely explained, why we need the subject, and what's it's use. Now I see myself digging thing on my own, and realising how cool a lot of subjects are.
    • jononomo 2y ago
      No. Biology is unique in the sense that life is the creation of God and is far more complex and awe-inspiring than any other subject.
• AdeptusAquinas 2y ago
  Hmm, I'm studying first year biology at uni and they convey a lot of wonder with it. Especially when at the same time you study human bioscience (organ systems, tissues etc) and chemistry for biology the sheer wonder of all the little machines working together effectively by random collisions comes off as magical. I just wish we had a better way to see it. Some sort of approach that would allow us to observe molecules in real time :| An electron microscope of some very dead extracted material just isn't the same.
  • nicd 2y ago
    Fluorescence microscopy is a great tool for this!
• fabian2k 2y ago
  My experience with high school biology was similar, though that might have been that particular teacher. He was close to retirement and while he could have identified most plants in the region, he could not answer most of my questions about biochemistry. I found that the first semester of biochemistry at university alone changed my understanding of biology. The quality and depth of the education was so much higher than what I had in school before. A large part is of course that it is so much more focused, you could not go to that depth in a general purpose school education. It does go again in a different direction later. Once you learned the general principles you might have to learn all the inconsistent details that are present in the actual biological systems. And the immune system is certainly one of the worst offenders here. There are a lot of really fascinating aspects about it, especially how it adapts and learns. But you quickly get to a points where you're just overwhelmed by the incredibly amount of different parts that play a role in it.
  • ReleaseCandidat 2y ago
    > My experience with high school biology was similar, though that might have been that particular teacher. He was close to retirement and while he could have identified most plants in the region, he could not answer most of my questions about biochemistry. That's a totally different problem. Nobody can expect a teacher (or scientist, or ...) to be equally interested in all subfields. Of course, they should know "what is needed" - whatever that means, for example to teach the part of biochemistry that is in the curriculum. I, as a mathematician, for example don't care much about statistics or number theory. As somebody generally interested in biology I don't care about biochemistry. So, as long as he didn't just say "fuck off", you can't blame your teacher for liking something else than you did.
  • grogenaut 2y ago
    when were you in highschool? I took honors bio back in 93 in highschool and it was all memorization of aniimal and plants parts. I'm taking bio 180 at UW now (20 years after graduating college) and it's all about genetics and statistics. They're almost different subjects. One is closer to farming and exploring and the latter is more science and the unseen. I could totally see an end of career hs teacher staying with the older style. Also I bet that dude knew where all of the morels grew.
• streptomycin 2y ago
  When I took biochemistry as an undergrad, it was taught by a somewhat eccentric professor who instead taught it more like "History of Molecular Biology". And it was super interesting. But all the premed students hated it lol Besides that, every other bio course I ever took was just rote memorization (except ones taught in math/engineering departments). Bio 101 was maybe the hardest class I ever took because it was so damn boring to memorize all those random facts.
  • grogenaut 2y ago
    This is why I didn't take it when I got my undergrad. I was good at formulas and bad at memorization. I'm taking it now 20 years later after getting an EMT certification and realizing that yes I can do memorization. That said I'm taking intro bio right now and it's not that much memorization. End goal os ti take org to see how bad it is.
• thorum 2y ago
  I agree wholeheartedly with this: > In biology class, biology wasn’t presented as a quest for the secrets of life. The textbooks wrung out the questing. We were nowhere acquainted with real biologists, the real questions they had, the real experiments they did to answer them. We were just given their conclusions. So - not just for biology - what are some good books or other learning resources that encourage questing, curiosity and wonder? The first one that comes to mind is Feynman’s Lectures.
  • ReleaseCandidat 2y ago
    > what are some good books or other learning resources that encourage questing, curiosity and wonder Children. Best before they enter a school (or anything resembling something similar).
  • ampdepolymerase 2y ago
    Most of the pop sci books are useless for practical use cases, and similarly the Feynman lectures self select for the physics/mathematically inclined. Biology is a leaky abstraction, it's very hard to do anything with rigor without having a strong foundation in the fundamentals. You see the same discussion on hacker news when it comes to music, people are more interested in mapping programming concepts to music notation and complaining about western music presentation than the music itself. For biology, you need need to have a firm understanding of the central dogma and biochemistry if you want to do anything beyond surface level empirical trial and error. Most people, especially the "hacker types", only have a vague understanding of the former i.e. DNA translation and transcription and that's about the limit. You absolutely have to gain an intuition for biochemistry if you want to do things with rigor, otherwise you will just be the biotech equivalent of a bootcamp web developer, fit for washing test tubes and not much else.
    • MajimasEyepatch 2y ago
      Absolutely right. These basic concepts like the central dogma aren't especially hard to learn, but it's important to really understand them deeply if you want anything to make sense. Among textbooks, Molecular Biology of the Gene by James Watson et al. is a good starting point to understand the central dogma: DNA -> RNA -> Protein. Likewise Molecular Biology of the Cell by Alberts et al. for cell biology. An Introduction to Systems Biology by Uri Alon is good for the more mathematically inclined once you're ready to get more advanced, though you should really have a solid grasp on the fundamentals of molecular and cellular biology first. None of this is for the faint of heart, but it's not especially difficult either. It's unfortunate that it's hard to get hands-on experience with biology once you've graduated from college, which helps a lot to connect the dots, but there are still plenty of great resources out there.
• rrr_oh_man 2y ago
  This resonated a lot: > Enormous subjects are best approached in thin, deep slices. I discovered this when first learning how to program. The textbooks never worked; it all only started to click when I started to do little projects for myself. The project wasn’t just motivation but an organizing principle, a magnet to arrange the random iron filings I picked up along the way. I’d care to learn about some abstract concept, like “memoization,” because I needed it to solve my problem; and these concepts would lose their abstractness in the light of my example.
  • willturman 2y ago
    It’s a wonderful experience when hazy abstractions of complexity click into clarity. I’m not sure I’ve ever found that without tangible motivation and immersion in a problem space, although excellent writings can bring one to the doorstep.
  • Terr_ 2y ago
    This also applies to less-cerebral tasks. For example, I didn't learn to touch-type due to a school class with edutainment software, but because after one summer of arguing with people over dial-up, I had learned it just to get the words out faster.
    • agileAlligator 2y ago
      Exactly how I learned to touch type; only it was Discord not IRC. The more things change, the more they remain the same.
      • namaria 2y ago
        Same here. I learned touch typing to furiously debate online as well =) MSN messenger in my case haha
        • Izkata 2y ago
          I guess a less usual one, compared to the other comments: For me it was StarCraft multiplayer, had to type fast so I could get back to controlling my units. Because I was rapidly going back and forth between the keyboard and mouse, it resulted in an unusual style where I use the outline of the keyboard for hand placement, and attempting to use the home row slows me down significantly.
• freetime2 2y ago
  I loved biology in high school. I had one of the most boring teachers ever, and literally slept through class half the time, but then I would go home and read the text book for homework assignments and I found it totally fascinating. It was kind of running gag that the teacher could wake me up and ask me a question at any time and I always knew the answer, to the amusement of the other students. But my secret was just that I found it interesting and easy to absorb. I don’t really like the idea of blaming others for one’s lack of curiosity about a subject. There are a lot of factors that determine how receptive we are to learning something - current interests, life experience, how developed our brains are, etc - beyond just the way it is taught. I have a much deeper appreciation for geology now than I did in school, for example, and I’m fairly certain that I’m the one who changed, not the way plate tectonics are taught.
  • AlotOfReading 2y ago
    Even if you pin the "blame" directly on teachers, they have a difficult situation. They need to get 3-5 classes of 20-40 mostly obnoxious kids to learn a broad array of material prescribed by other people. They have to do this while also correcting behavioral issues and dealing with parents or admins. They're mostly not domain experts knowledgeable enough to give individualized deep dives to each of their students, but even if they were it would make their already-difficult task impossible. It's a wonder that any sort of individualized instruction manages to exist at all.
    • derivative7 2y ago
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      • deleted 2y ago
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      • xcv123 2y ago
        > cushy jobs Compared to what? Coal mining? Sewer maintenance? > well-above-average remuneration No. Below average remuneration. Median Public School Teacher Salary in the United States: $57,947 [0] Average salary in the U.S. in 2024: $59,384 [1] [0] https://www.salary.com/research/salary/benchmark/public-school-teacher-salary https://www.salary.com/research/salary/benchmark/public-scho... [1] https://www.usatoday.com/money/blueprint/business/hr-payroll/average-salary-us/ https://www.usatoday.com/money/blueprint/business/hr-payroll...
• jll29 2y ago
  There isn't another book like "Gödel, Escher, Bach"; when I ordered it at 16, because I was curious after having seen it mentioned in very different contexts, reading it was a life-changing event. Because this is beyond what your typical high school teachers can discuss, quickly followed orders of biochemistry university textbooks, and thankfully now - a few decades on - I get paid for life-long learning, grateful for each moment of awe.
  • kmmlng 2y ago
    How did you manage to secure a job where you get paid for life-long learning?
• sampo 2y ago
  According to archive.org, this was maybe written in 2020.
• BroomOfSYS 2y ago
  This is probably true for almost every subject, I found myself hating chemistry in high school mainly due to a bad teacher, but then I watch thiings like red nile on YT and am amazed hor funny this subject is.
• Jerrrry 2y ago
  Biology is unique; no other classical study, in modern practice, (can) contain both the sheer magnitude of complexity and the propensity to sweep away that same complexity with just a mere (if only temporary) classification. This may be a result of academic laziness - the question begs, especially when the answer is known. But showing your work is tedious in some fields, and impossible in others. The questions posed in biology must be formulated to be answerable a-priori with evidence that often appears to be biased towards confirmation outside of the domains of specialized experts. It's hard to inspire wonder in the juxtapositional environment where any discovery will, at minimum, produce a magnitude more questions - all to be relegated to labels until another wave of motivation and technological processes facilitate another plateau of progress to be confronted. Biology is hard. It's like reverse engineering, from scratch, the watch you found on the beach; 50 years and 50 miles away from the watch factory.
  • wrs 2y ago
    It’s much, much harder than that! The watch was at least designed by a human, with parts that have at most a few simultaneous functions. All the parts are big enough to see, and made of metal so constant shape-shifting isn’t part of their functionality. It was mostly designed to be understandable. Biology is just a giant soup of whatever works. Any organizing principles are accidental or only exist in the eye of the beholder. Finding some temporary unifying mechanism or principle to organize understanding with is the only way to make progress, but the history of biology is packed with ideas that eventually hardened into dogma and blocked progress until somebody managed to blow them up.
    • Jerrrry 2y ago
      >Biology is just a giant soup of whatever works. Any organizing principles are accidental or only exist in the eye of the beholder. Evolution is the difficult-to-understand answer to this; we tend to anthropomorphically and erroneously assign intent and purpose in a chicken/egg and begging-the-question way. Life continues until it doesn't; to assign any more gravitas to our collection of localized complexity is the same awe that a plebeian holds when presented with a meatball-and-spaghetti-on-a-wall painting of modern art; ignorant to them that it was all that remained after a rather particularly sticky food fight.
• dang 2y ago
  Related: I should have loved biology - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32035054 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32035054 - July 2022 (271 comments) Discussed at the time: I should have loved biology - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25136422 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25136422 - Nov 2020 (298 comments)
  • paulgb 2y ago
    Thank, Dan. Some further context: this was posted in another thread yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40102956 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40102956. I liked it so much I yoinked it and submitted to main.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • wy35 2y ago
      Wow, downvotes were harsh here. FWIW I don’t think it’s a bad thing to repost articles that were last posted years ago. I didn’t see this article when it was posted in 2020 and 2022, and I probably wouldn’t have seen it ever if you didn’t repost it now.
• foobarbecue 2y ago
  My high school biology teacher (Ms Dinnetz, Kungsholmen's Gymnasium) was absolutely amazing. She had a way of really briging the material to life, or rather, to death. That is, every time she taught us a new concept she would describe the way we'd die without that concept. An extremely memorable class.
• keyshapegeo99 2y ago
  Beautifully written piece whose premise I disagree with. At least in the UK (the States may be different), you are taught many of the concepts and underlying reasoning that the author bemoans not having learned. At A-Level standard, you are taught the physical basis of epigenetic modification (what he describes as switching genes on or off - although that in itself is a too-binary simplification, it's more to do with up- and down-regulation of expression). You're also taught other fascinating processes such as alternative splicing - where a single gene can express many different proteins. During my first year of undergrad at a so-so Russell Group university, the history of biology featured prominently in lectures - especially those on the evolution of genetics as a field. The inherent fuzziness of categories and concepts in biology was also made very clear. I distinctly remember a lecturer telling us (in response to a question about why we say bacteria don't have membrane-bound organelles, when the topic of the lecture - the magnetosome - was clearly an exception to this rule) that when we say something is 'always true' in biology, we mean it happens 80%+ of the time, and when we say something 'never happens' in biology, we really mean that it happens less than 20% of the time. I do agree that there is sometimes a bit too much of an emphasis on rote learning the chemical minutiae at the expense of the broader, more important concepts (Krebs cycle, anyone?) - but I think this case is overblown by the author.
  • icambron 2y ago
    I took high school bio in the US, and mostly agree with both of these: > you are taught many of the concepts and underlying reasoning that the author bemoans not having learned > there is sometimes a bit too much of an emphasis on rote learning the chemical minutiae at the expense of the broader, more important concepts (Krebs cycle, anyone?) But note that the author was almost certainly only talking about high school biology. I think the situation is that in the US, an AP Biology (bio class for seniors in high school) teacher has to trade off teaching the concepts with teaching to the AP test all the seniors will take, and that test prep does involve stuff like memorizing the Krebs cycle so that you can forget right after the test. My teacher did a pretty good job of this balance and I got a lot out of it, but mileage may vary. Next, the kids will do well on the test and that will let them dodge their university's biology requirement. That class would have been much better. (I'm was in exactly this camp.)
• montebicyclelo 2y ago
  It does seem to be the norm for interesting things to be presented in a boring way, rather than the exception. I'd guess this is partly because it's difficult to explain concepts clearly in the first place, let alone make the explanation engaging... Hypothesis: If writing educational material is like throwing a dart, you have a bigger target if you aim for just "clear" — if you aim for "clear ∩ engaging" you have less chance of being "clear". size(clear ∩ engaging) < size(clear) I think time pressure would come into play with this. If you have the time, you can hone in on the "clear ∩ engaging" zone; but if you are pressed for time you just aim for "clear" which you'll hit more quickly. And if you're really pressed for time (and/or uncaring), you might aim for "passable" rather than "clear"; something that your colleagues would OK, but that isn't particularly great. This is a larger target than "clear". size(passable) > size(clear)
  • makeitdouble 2y ago
    A bigger issue would be that a course isn't presented to a small group of kids who need to be engaged ("shaken by the shoulder" as the author says), it's for the whole class, including: - kids who're already engaged, though aren't studying on their own and need some bare explainations - kids who don't want to be engaged and won't be anyway - kids who could be engaged depending on some other factor that no other kid cares about Teaching to a class of 30+ kids means you can't take any extreme bet on what will work as a teaching method, and going for the most energy efficient way is a good practice in general.
• openrisk 2y ago
  Biology is interesting and intellectually attractive without having to try too hard but the way it is typically taught is off-putting for the more mathematical types. Which is a pity. Biology is the very definition of complexity science and while more fundamental physics research becomes increasingly esoteric and unproductive, life sciences provide an opportunity and a tangible challenge to invent new mathematics and computational tools that are a quantum leap versus our current toolkit. E.g., morphogenesis has attracted people like Alan Turing and Rene Thom but it feels that there is still a vast universe to be understood more fundamentally and accelerating that pace might be even of vital importance for our welfare.
• mandibeet 2y ago
  I think the love for school subjects largely depends on the teacher
• npunt 2y ago
  Nobody's talking about the author's point at the end of the article, that we need better tools to reason about biology, and that the biology as a subject has a particular gap between reality and content that perhaps other subjects do not. I couldn't agree more. Right now we're sipping the natural world's most complex ideas through the straws of simple language and static diagrams, and the constraints of all of these mediums (including school itself) in aggregate naturally lean toward making biology a rote memorization subject. Reasoning about biology in the way that it appears in nature is, in these mediums, going against the grain. It happens, but it's not the default. Your story about having a good biology teacher is this exception, not the default. Complex things requires easy to use systems that reflect that complexity. That's the subject here - how do we build these methods of communication and understanding?
  • piecerough 2y ago
    Isn't this what we're all betting massive Transformer architectures are going to give us? Tools to explore and handle complex concepts. Reasoning may still be left to us, though.
    • npunt 2y ago
      Absolutely! Super exciting! But how precisely will it work? Right now I don't know of an AI tool that can make a halfway decent biology diagram, let alone a complex 3d animation of a biological process you can talk to and ask questions of. The article was a call to action for this type of tooling. I'd love to see this thread move from 'my experience in school was good/bad' to 'what if we made something that did X' or 'have you seen Y' :)
    • barrenko 2y ago
      https://www.ladanuzhna.xyz/writing/deep-learning-for-biochem https://www.ladanuzhna.xyz/writing/deep-learning-for-biochem from previous HN topics
  • breck 2y ago
    > Complex things requires easy to use systems that reflect that complexity...how do we build these methods of communication and understanding? We've had the wetware for understanding complex systems for thousands of years. We added symbolics for communicating complex things later. Nowadays, many people weak in symbolics are excellent in understanding, and many people expert in symbolics are novice in understanding. I am not sure whether we are missing a symbolic form that is closer aligned to understanding, or whether we've simply overvalued symbolics at the expense of understanding.
• fmy105 2y ago
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  • QuantumG 2y ago
    The second half of the article is certainly preferable to the whining at the beginning.
  • bokoharambe 2y ago
    Your post really demonstrates how different people can have very different experiences of the same field. I love biology too, yet I care very little about chemicals or chemistry, and I wish there was more of a track for studying biology while abstracting away from the biological particulars. An approach to biology focused on the large scale- ecology, biospherics, and life exists as a geophysical phenomenon, would be really nice. That's the sort of thing that I care about, and you really don't need to reference the nanoscale in detail for considering it. I think we can all agree though that the unstructured memorization approach benefits 0 students.
    • bglazer 2y ago
      You might enjoy this course form Yale. It’s called Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior. I listened to it as a podcast several years ago. It was my first introduction to “real”, not high school, biology, and it blew my mind. The material is presented at exactly the level you describe, mostly abstracted to general principles that guide all of life, but the professor also presents really fascinating examples of how each principle is instantiated in nature. I found it to be very approachable too, as a computer scientist. It was a big part of my inspiration to go to grad school to study biology. So be careful haha. Don’t end up a grad student like me. One final note is that biology is exceptionally weird in that the chemistry and the big principles like evolution are inseparable in reality. You can certainly study them separately but there are a few things that just won’t make sense without understanding some of the molecular details. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6299F3195349CCDA&si=GQIdkWOvPxUvrl-h https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6299F3195349CCDA&si=GQId...
  • quantrox 2y ago
• bentt 2y ago
  There is a website called Smart Biology with amazing 3D animated videos of cellular systems. https://www.smart-biology.com/ https://www.smart-biology.com/ Pretty cheap for individuals as well: https://smart-biology-academy.getlearnworlds.com/courses https://smart-biology-academy.getlearnworlds.com/courses I don't work for them or have any monetary interest in them. They just do very cool work and I'd like to see them get more awareness. I wish we had videos like theirs when I was in school.
  • victor106 2y ago
    this is amazing!!!
    • bentt 2y ago
      Right? I couldn't believe the OP article didn't mention it.
• Terr_ 2y ago
  > 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. –Bert Hubert, “Our Amazing Immune System” I like to refer to it as nanotechnology beyond human comprehension, discovered on a planet that experienced a "grey goo" apocalypse. Every possible pore of its surface is now infested rogue units, in a constant arms-race of development. Some have even been yoked into titanic moving megastructures and inscrutable hive-minds.
  • Terr_ 2y ago
    Tangentially related: We like to imagine cyborg metal bodies, but we don't always appreciate all the features of our standard nanotech. From an old post: ________ When it comes to the bio-engineering of the human limbs, just remember that you're sacrificing raw force/speed for a system with a great deal of other trade-offs which would be difficult for modern science to replicate. 1. Supports a very large number of individual movements and articulations 2. Meets certain weight-restrictions (overall system must be near-buoyant in water) 3. Supports a wide variety of automatic self-repair techniques, many of which can occur without ceasing operation 4. Is entirely produced and usually maintained by unskilled (unconscious?) labor from common raw materials 5. Contains a comprehensive suite of sensors 6. Not too brittle, flexes to store and release mechanical energy from certain impacts 7. Selectively reinforces itself when strain is detected 8. Has areas for the storage of long-term energy reserves, which double as an impact cushion 9. Houses small fabricators to replenish some of its own operating fluids 10. Subsystems for thermal management (evaporative cooling, automatic micro-activation)
    • sweetjuly 2y ago
      This is one of my favorite sci-fi concepts. There's only so far your high tech nano-particle swarm can spread before resources become a serious limiting factor. If you're limiting yourself just to earth, certain resources that a swarm might need to reproduce will be scarce/energy intensive to extract and utilize (mining rare earths, fabricating highly advanced semiconductors, etc.). It's extraordinarily easy, however, to produce billions of cells nearly anywhere on earth because the cells that we have are especially adapted for ease of reproduction in these exact conditions.
• rkagerer 2y ago
  This section of the article was illuminating: But biology, like computing, has a bottom, and the bottom is not abstract. It’s physical. It’s shapes bumping into each other .... Hemoglobin ... was shown to be an efficient store of energy because of how oxygen atoms snap into its body like Legos, each snap widening the remaining slots, so that it loads itself up practically at a gulp Most proteins are like this. The ones that drive locomotion twist like little motors; the ones that contract muscles climb and compress each other. Cells, too, are constantly in conversation, and the language they speak is shape. It’s keys entering locks: a protein might straddle the cell membrane, and when a cytokine (that’s a kind of signaling molecule) docks with it, it changes its shape, so that its grip loosens on some other molecule on the interior side of the membrane...
• esclerofilo 2y ago
  The HN crowd probably knows that understanding maths concepts is a very rewarding experience. It is also very useful for $Nth grade, because it allows you to apply the principles to different problems than the ones you've seen solved. However, if you try teaching a "bad at maths" kid how to solve a quadratic equation, explaining how to factorize and why it works is a bad strategy. They _prefer_ using the formula IME. They don't want to understand the concepts, they want to pass their exams, and rote memorizing the formula is a faster/more reliable way to do it. I'll admit that maybe I'm just a bad teacher. After all, I'm not a teacher, I'm a CS grad who has done some teaching. But think of the average class, with 40 students. The teacher needs all of them to learn to perform some tasks. He'll choose the one-size-fits all solution, even if it's less beautiful, less motivating for the kids that find maths to be fun. I'm not saying we should go back to having schools for "gifted kids". They have well-documented problems, and I'm not at all qualified to pick one side of the tradeoff. All I'm saying is that boring biology classes are there for a reason, not just teachers without passion.
  • Synaesthesia 2y ago
    I still recommend learning and practicing the proper factorization of a quadratic equation, it's a lot faster than using the formula. It's quite a bit of extra boring practice but worth it IMO.
• the__alchemist 2y ago
  F12 dev tools -> edit CSS -> `body` -> max-width: 1000px
• matrissian 2y ago
  biology bored me as a kid, but now it's fascinating. life is lovely.
• matrissian 2y ago
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• the__alchemist 2y ago
  Perhaps this is obvious, but if you liked this article, check out the works referenced in it! The Eighth Day of Creation, The Machinery of Life, A Computer Scientist’s Guide to Cell Biology, and GEB are all outsanding.
• Jalu323 2y ago
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• plaidfuji 2y ago
  > For a computer scientist, a biologist’s methods can seem insane; the trouble comes from the fact that cells are too small, too numerous, too complex to analyze the way a programmer would, say in a step-by-step debugger. I think this is probably the part about biology that people outside of biology appreciate the least. We know a lot about how cells and proteins work now. But despite this fact, it is still extremely difficult to understand exactly what is happening within a given cell in situ. Many measurement methods are likely to destroy or alter the thing you’re trying to measure… think Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle - the act of measuring the thing changes its state. Everything is sensitive to temperature, shear, ionic strength, pH, etc… and of course most methods rely on these levers to gain resolution and signal. So you have to have a clear idea of what you think is happening to even select a measurement technique that won’t ruin it. This is part of why, while we know a lot of the fundamentals, it is still hard to engineer functionality in specific environments .. engineering requires a lot of measurement and feedback. I think that also offers insight into why software can be engineered so quickly. It’s a discipline where you can (relatively) easily place a probe wherever you want and understand exactly what’s happening in a (sometimes) deterministic manner. Everyone else is taking fuzzy shots in the dark compared to software. Imagine replicates being a thing you have to think about when debugging a program. Like in software, running your code again with no changes after it just failed is insanity. In every other engineering discipline, you sometimes have entire meetings to decide how many times to retry something that just failed.
  • IIsi50MHz 2y ago
    > Imagine replicates being a thing you have to think about when debugging a program. Like in software, running your code again with no changes after it just failed is insanity. This is a common requirement in software QA. "Can we reproduce the issue? Does it happen every time? Is it sensitive to timing of user actions, or anything else? What part of the initial state of the system could affect this outcome? What other external or environmental changes will alter the result?" Sometimes, the initial failure seems to have an obvious answer, and sometimes an immediate code change is the best first move. But replicating a behaviour does is insanity.
  • jbm 2y ago
• kevbin 2y ago
  Who needs someone else to tell them what’s interesting?! Isn’t “Golgi apparatus” enough to get you going? If you’re relying on a teacher—or some blogger,for that matter—-to call out everything that’s worth finding out about, you’re going to miss a lot of stuff & most of the really good stuff.
• divbzero 2y ago
  > Using just a centrifuge, water, detergent, and acid, he purified nucleic acid from his smooth strep culture. Precipitated with alcohol, it became fibrous. He added a tiny bit of it to the rough culture, and lo, that culture became smooth in the following generations. This fibrous stuff, then, was “the transforming principle”—the long-sought agent of heredity. I guess that’s why we still call the process of bacteria taking up DNA “bacterial transformation”. It was the terminology they used early on.
• jdwyah 2y ago
  “But no one shook me by the shoulders, saying how crazy that was.” If you’re lookin for a book that has absolutely kept this sense of wonder, “Immune” by Philipp Dettmer has this in spades. Highly recommended.
• Ozzie_osman 2y ago
  Not biology, but I had a great astronomy professor in high school and fell in love with the topic. The vastness of the universe, the physics behind it. How people measured the distance to a star or the curvature of the earth. Then I got to college and was effectively told, if I studied astronomy, I'd end up in academia perpetually and I wasn't ready to make that commitment. So I fell back to CS. And sometimes I wonder....
• mcmoor 2y ago
  I notice that every single thing the article talks about is cellular or molecular biology, which I did immediately like while in high school for reasons mentioned. But the reason why I don't actually like biology is the entire other parts of it, namely taxonomy and environmental biology. I just couldn't care about it. I don't want to know how to differentiate between ants based on how many antennas they have, or what this biome actually is based on percentage of pine trees there are. And I suspect lots of the time, when people talked about biology they actually talked about this because this is what's actually taught in elementary and middle school where impressions are formed. And this is what Feynmann refers to as "stamp collecting".
  • kkylin 2y ago
    "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution" - T. Dobzhansky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodosius_Dobzhansky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodosius_Dobzhansky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_in_Biology_Makes_Sense_Except_in_the_Light_of_Evolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_in_Biology_Makes_Sense... Seeing biology in light of processes on (evolutionary, developmental, ecological) timescales is one of the 2-3 realizations that made biology interesting for me.
  • a_bonobo 2y ago
    Ed Yong recently published a beautiful article on the joy of birding: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/30/opinion/birding-spring-merlin-ebird.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/30/opinion/birding-spring-me... To me, birding always seemed to be the worst kind of Feynman's stamp collecting. But there's so much more beauty and joy hidden in knowing what lives around you in detail; your connection with your surroundings will grow deep. To quote: >So much more of the natural world feels close and accessible now. When I started birding, I remember thinking that I’d never see most of the species in my field guide. Sure, backyard birds like robins and western bluebirds would be easy, but not black skimmers or peregrine falcons or loggerhead shrikes. I had internalized the idea of nature as distant and remote — the province of nature documentaries and far-flung vacations. But in the past six months, I’ve seen soaring golden eagles, heard duetting great horned owls, watched dancing sandhill cranes and marveled at diving Pacific loons, all within an hour of my house. “I’ll never see that” has turned into “Where can I find that?”
• texthompson 2y 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. This is only mostly right. Every cell in your body has an astonishingly similar amount of DNA, but every cell division (and even steady state DNA repair) offers the opportunity for mutations. So your cells are all astonishingly similar, but there can be detectable differences. One implication of this is that cells that are closer to each other in developmental history will have more similar DNA. One of my colleagues in graduate school used this to do phylogenetic lineaging, where he looked at markers in DNA from whole organisms to reason about which cells are closely related, and which cells have a more distant developmental ancestor. Biology is super cool! I hope that everyone finds a little bit of it that they can enjoy. :)
  • j7ake 2y ago
    Also B cells and T cells undergo genomic rearrangements to get a diversity of receptors that can make specific targets.
• Jalu323 2y ago
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• richrichie 2y ago
  >I wish my high school biology teacher had asked the class how an embryo could possibly differentiate—and then paused to let us really think about it. The most fascinating question is "Why" and that cannot be answered or debated in the school setting.
• lannisterstark 2y ago
  As someone who is a few years into their CS career, I wish I knew where to 'restart' learning sciences (bio,chm,phy). I am quickly overwhelmed by the plethora of resources people throw at you when you ask that question (There's Khan Academy, there's OCW, there's actual textbooks, coursera, pop science etc)... Anyone manage to at least start? If so, where? I mostly forgot my university level science courses.
  • ray__ 2y ago
    One option would be to start from what you already know–there are many opportunities to apply CS to life/physical sciences problems. I like rosalind.info, you can start with code and then read independently to fill in any gaps in your knowledge that you come across.
    • lannisterstark 2y ago
      Tbf, I am less worried about CS (I already do a lot of technology stuff to solve my IRL problems, not necessarily coding related either - media servers and such), but more about other sciences. Reading Asimov's essays and a Brief history by Bryson etc have left me a desire to learn more.
• ojbyrne 2y ago
  Another anecdotal data point: I took biology first year of college and we had labs where we looked at things under a microscope and draw what we saw. And for whatever reason - inability to draw, difficulty focusing on what I saw, or that things moved, I just couldn’t do it. We were required to pass the labs to pass the course. I ended up dropping the course.
• alextheparrot 2y ago
  I love the romance of this piece, but in my experience he’s just describing the difference in expectations of learning biology at a high school versus advanced undergraduate to graduate level. Romance is for those who care, and most don’t. But it is so, so beautiful once you do.
• kazinator 2y ago
  > Someone probably told me that every cell in my body has the same DNA. That isn't necessarily true though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimera_(genetics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimera_(genetics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(genetics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(genetics)
  • pfdietz 2y ago
    Also: the modification of DNA in B Cells, for the formation of new antibodies. It's akin to generation of new inputs in fuzzing. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK26860/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK26860/
• j7ake 2y ago
  It might be for the better. There is a big difference between reading about cool biology versus doing biology as a profession. Biology is a brutal career that requires an army of hands to realise a vision.
  • lbeltrame 2y ago
    Then there are the computational biologists, such as myself. Many have a CS background but some (raises hand) actually come from biology itself (I was a wet lab scientist for a number of years). At this point I'm thinking I got the worst of both worlds... (I jest! But on bad days I do feel like that)
• czxtm 2y ago
  Articles like this are why I visit HN - most days HN feels like the equivalent of quickly skimming my email inbox - but every once in a while there's a gem like this article that moves me deeply
• minmax2020 2y ago
  Watching Dr. Eric Lander's lectures in MIT OCW Biology course was a watershed moment in my life. I felt exactly the same way as this blog post after finishing the course, two years after graduating from college. Highly recommended if you haven't seen it yet: https://youtu.be/P-Ry4rRdDbk?si=Hp2SEkEKGeeui-pP https://youtu.be/P-Ry4rRdDbk?si=Hp2SEkEKGeeui-pP
• incompatible 2y ago
  "... was like a small Lisp program, with macros begetting macros begetting macros, the source code containing within it all of the instructions required for life on Earth. Could anything more interesting be imagined?" Interesting, but in the head-mangling way of debugging complex TeX macros, or the original sendmail.cf. Avoid, if you value your sanity.
• quantrox 2y ago
  If anyone has any understanding of chemistry it is indeed astonishing. Living organisms managed to develop chemistry in very tough conditions. All is done in environment full of water. Water itself is good solvent for some reactions. However, in many of other reactions it acts as reagent and before chemical process is started the water needs to be removed. Biochemistry laughs at water. Another thing is the temperature. Considering human (but there are many organisms without internal temperature control, and there is much colder than in our bodies) it is only 37 deg. C. Many chemical reactions are endothermic, they require a lot of energy to pass the activation barrier. In the laboratory we can keep the reaction under the reflux, which means constant boiling for hours or sometimes even days. Another thing is the pH. Some reactions require to be done in more or less acidic or basic environment. Biochemistry also laughs at pH and all is done in 7.4 (considering human). And finally, stereochemistry. It is also very important how the molecule is oriented in space. Things like proteins need to fold in specific manner. If someone looks on the biochemical pathways they are indeed very complex. But it is not without purpose. It is amazing.
• atemerev 2y ago
  This is the video that produced the same effect on me. Apoptosis (2006): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DR80Huxp4y8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DR80Huxp4y8 We are all made of nanobots.
• veddox 2y ago
  Speaking as a biologist, it saddens me every time I hear somebody say that they dropped biology as soon as they could in high school, because they inevitably do so just before it starts to get interesting. The problem is that biology is a subject where you need a lot of fundamental knowledge before you can start to understand how things actually work - simply because the systems involved are so complex and have so many interacting parts. You need to learn an awful lot of facts before you can start putting the puzzle pieces together to see the big picture. But once you do, the view is amazing! As an aside, I lament that the author equates "biology" with "molecular biology". He completely ignores the wonders of ecology - the beauty of biodiversity, the marvel of trophic cascades, the intricacies of ecosystem functioning. In fact, I think the challenges he sees for molecular biology are heightened for ecology: what you learn of it in high school is often even drier, you need even more background knowledge to be able to see the big picture, and research is even more challenging because experiments can seldom be done in a lab. Yet, once you've dug your way into it, you get to see systems at work that span the globe, that are as complex as anything that happens in a cell, just more vibrant and tangible and alive.
  • jeffreyrogers 2y ago
    I don't think you need that much context if you start with an organ system. For example, I got interested in biology by learning about how the kidneys work. You can give a pretty handwavy explanation to get someone oriented and then go into more and more detail (for example about the structure of the nephron, the hormones involved, how filtration works at a molecular level, etc.) The other organ systems are similar. Once you know about the organ systems development and genetics are well motivated and easier to pick up. And from there you have a pretty good scaffold from which to fill in the rest of human biology.
• mogoman 2y ago
  As others have mentioned, this resonates well. But for me, not only biology. Looking back, I wish my history teacher had done something similar; taken me by the shoulders and shook me until I really understood what we were learning. Instead, major events in our history ended up being "memorize yet another date" rather than us understanding the impact these events had on us or our parents/grandparents.
  • namaria 2y ago
    I love History but so much of teaching it in school boils down to just periodization. There are such interesting patterns at play, over millennia, mixing geography, psychology, technology, economy, you name it. Whatever humans do. It's fascinating how much a systems understanding of History can teach about the world around us. But yeah sadly in school it often boils down to lists of names, dates and periods.
• lordnacho 2y ago
  There's too much focus on the "what we know" like Kreb's cycle, which is easily examinable. The focus should actually be "how we found out", something like what the book A Brief History of Everything traces out. Things like "we used isotopes with different masses to figure out this thing about phosphorous in DNA". In general, the "what" makes no sense without the history. Why were we searching for DNA in the mid 20th century? What did we already know? Retracing science as an investigation would be much more beneficial to kids than making them remember the conclusions. It's much more portable as a skill to understand the path of investigation than some facts about organelles that they aren't likely to use. But the real reason I dropped biology when the choice came (and why did it come, dear IB organisation?) is that biology is not seen as the smart kid subject, when compared to physics and chemistry. Part if this is that you can grind your way through memorizing the biochemical cycles, probably easier for most than learning calculus that you need for physics. But part of it is simply reputation, and it's not reasonable. I have a friend who is a postdoc stats guy in the biology field. There's actually a deep need for numeracy in biology, people just don't seem to know it when they're in school.
  • jonplackett 2y ago
    I had this same experience being taught physics and maths. Just a bunch of what feel like pretty dull experiments which ends with a gold leaf moving... But the STORY of physics is fascinating. Why each experiment was done, by who, to prove what etc etc. All the sciences are like a soap opera of personalities and disagreements that make them much more interesting - and memorable - if you know the back story. That 'thin deep slice' comment really sums it up. No context, just a thing to memorise. I think physics students should be give The Fabric of the Cosmos my Brian Greene to read before they start doing any actual learning. I bet there's a biology equivalent of a book that is a 'what we know so far and what we don't understand' - if you know of one please let me know.
    • Jensson 2y ago
      > All the sciences are like a soap opera of personalities and disagreements that make them much more interesting Most people don't like soap operas and would zone out due to that, you might get a different set of people interested but you wouldn't get more.
• littlelady 2y ago
  I feel very lucky to have had very talented and passionate teachers in my K-12 education. Their enthusiasm for their subjects was infectious! I'm currently tutoring a pupil who isn't so lucky. Trying to get her interested in the dry material that she has to do is by far one of the greatest challenges and has required me to generate an interest in it that I can pass on to her.
• sebstefan 2y ago
  >I discovered this when first learning how to program. The textbooks never worked; it all only started to click when I started to do little projects for myself. The project wasn’t just motivation but an organizing principle, a magnet to arrange the random iron filings I picked up along the way. I’d care to learn about some abstract concept, like “memoization,” because I needed it to solve my problem; and these concepts would lose their abstractness in the light of my example. I think that's why we see people who've learned to program before college get that much more mileage from their courses They're not smarter, they've just faced the problems we're trying to solve, which gives them the motivation to care about the solutions they're presented with
• imhoguy 2y ago
  I didn't love biology in school, but I was luckily bored after school and watching "Il était une fois... la vie" and other series. Learning must start with fun. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0284735/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0284735/
• globular-toast 2y ago
  I thought the same when I went into a computational biology role and crammed virology for a few weeks before applying. I thought biology was about types of plants and animals. You know the stuff: label the parts of a flower, how many legs does an insect have etc. When you learn about viruses you have to learn the super low level stuff like DNA replication. I saw a video of DNA replication happening, it's like a little sewing machine going through and cutting up the molecule and joining it back together! And it's a code! What's not to like? But after a couple of years in the role I realised I was at a major disadvantage. The good people in biology actually do like and know the rest of it too. I was working on projects to do with plant biology. I did my bit. But the others came in to the greenhouses to tend their plants during the night on a weekend. They'd talk about high-level concepts that I just had no idea about. I was never going to be as passionate about it as they were, so I was never going to succeed. So yeah, do learn this stuff because it's amazing and unbelievably fascinating. This is a great article to whet your appetite. But there might be a reason you didn't love biology in school!
• VladimirGolovin 2y ago
  >> People ought to be walking around all day, all through their waking hours calling to each other in endless wonderment, talking of nothing except that cell. That's exactly what I did, for a year, after reading The Selfish Gene.
• Myrmornis 2y ago
  It's easy to agree with the sentiments in the first half of the article about how biology is taught uninspiringly. However, I can't help noticing that the biology student in the article evidently became a computer programmer later in life (I followed the same track), and probably is paid more than the biology teachers of their teenage years. So it's a bit uncomfortable to see them sniping at their former biology teachers from their position later in life. As with many conversations on such subjects, it feels that it's going to end up at "teachers aren't paid enough".
• hyperbovine 2y ago
  The Roche posters are an amazing conversation piece to have up on your wall, and they will even mail you a free copy!! https://www.roche.com/about/philanthropy/science-education/biochemical-pathways/ordering-posters https://www.roche.com/about/philanthropy/science-education/b...
• analog31 2y ago
  A problem with being inspired is that each of us is inspired by a different aspect of a field. For instance, I fell in love with math because of abstractions and proofs, the things that most students hate. I didn't need to be shown what math was useful for.
• trgn 2y ago
  As a counterpoint, Ligotti in Conspiracy against the human race: “One cringes to hear scientists cooing over the universe or any part thereof like schoolgirls over-heated by their first crush. [...] it would be nice if just one of these gushing eggheads would step back and, as a concession to objectivity, speak the truth: THERE IS NOTHING INNATELY IMPRESSIVE ABOUT THE UNIVERSE OR ANYTHING IN IT.” https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/497970-one-cringes-to-hear-scientists-cooing-over-the-universe-or https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/497970-one-cringes-to-hear-... Entire book is great read btw, no equivocating. The author will use CAPS to hammer home a point. Very refreshing, to read people who have a point to make.