Lovely article. The part that resonates most with me is towards the end: What some software developers would refer to as "friction". Medical tests are high fric

Lovely article. The part that resonates most with me is towards the end: What some software developers would refer to as "friction". Medical tests are high friction for reasons the author hinted at. I'm optimistic some of the cfDNA or fragmentome cancer screenings will be useful for catching cancer early. If you try to dig on the topics, you'll find that the projects (GRAIL etc) are proud their methods and datasets are proprietary. The ones that play the political and business game best are getting funding for trials. It seems there is a steady stream of progress in biology and its medical tie-ins, but it is slow and cumbersome. Unrelated: It seems like a lot of the techniques in biology are discovered partly by chance (ie dedicated work in an area that bears fruit, perhaps not in an expected form). Ways to leverage various bacteria, phages, proteins etc to provide insight, or perform a manipulation. The molecular biology techniques we have available seem like a tiny fraction of what we could discover. And in a way, it seems as much engineering or tool-making as science.