I should have loved biology

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.<p>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&#x27;m planning to have developed my first GMO yeast in the next 90 days.<p>If you&#x27;re interested, I also host the EverymanBio Podcast (YouTube &amp; iTunes) where I talk to folks doing incredible work in the biotech &#x2F; startup &#x2F; diybio community.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;everymanbio.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;everymanbio.com&#x2F;</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.instagram.com&#x2F;everymanbio&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.instagram.com&#x2F;everymanbio&#x2F;</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.linkedin.com&#x2F;in&#x2F;joshuamcginnis&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.linkedin.com&#x2F;in&#x2F;joshuamcginnis&#x2F;</a>

This isn&#x27;t just biology, it&#x27;s <i>school</i>. The only time you&#x27;re taught processes and methods, it&#x27;s when they&#x27;re busywork, and you&#x27;re wasting a year memorising how to do something nobody does any more because we have computers and calculators. What you&#x27;re being taught is to squash your individuality, demand and follow orders, and to seek your worth only in the approval of your betters.<p>But most of all, you&#x27;re being kept out of the house so that both your parents can go back to jobs they don&#x27;t like.

This article rings so true to me. My father is a microbiologist - and now, so is my fiancée. I&#x27;m very lucky that I get to learn about genetics through osmosis now, and boy, is it ever fascinating!<p>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 &amp; widely studied prokaryote, there&#x27;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&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;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&#x27;t discovered or probed yet.<p>I wish that everything in biology could be explained so neatly. Unfortunately, real biology is so incredibly messy. There&#x27;s just so much we don&#x27;t know - and so much that we can&#x27;t neatly slot into an explanation like this. But, I know now that in another life I probably would have been a biologist!

I read this and it it fills me with so much melancholy.<p>I took biology 101 in college and what I thought would be really interesting turned out to be <i>SO</i> unexpectedly meaningless.<p>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.<p>The course was so much about WHAT and never about WHY.<p>I don&#x27;t know if I was immature, or if the biology course was a &quot;weed out&quot; course designed to filter out all but the most dedicated, or if biology education is off the rails.<p>I do know that every subject would benefit from a little storytelling, a little excitement and a good helping of why.

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.<p>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).<p>Biology is great if you are interested in learning how the world works, but not so great if you love to create new things.<p>Even with medicine you are essentially a mechanic for humans instead of cars and the technology improves a lot slower.<p>I considered doing bioinformatics, but there was essentially no way to make money because grad students were doing everything for 12K&#x2F;year.<p>One great thing about biology is that it is easy to understand because everything makes sense and &quot;works&quot; like you think it should. Human created systems often times dont make sense at all.

Ah yes, the recurring obsession hacker news has with biology - except that no startup would pay a biologist a software engineer&#x27;s wage. Talking about biology is nice. But what&#x27;s nicer is dismantling the elephant in the room.

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&#x2F;lock metaphor that didn’t really explain anything.<p>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&#x2F;lock metaphor.<p>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.

He&#x27;s right, but it&#x27;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&#x27;ve learned that I&#x27;m a pretty bad teacher, and I can tell most people are really bad at it also. Even if you&#x27;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.<p>His complaint about calculating the surface of a triangle is fair, but actually I do remember that in 5th&#x2F;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&#x27;s really non trivial (and I hope people are working on it).

Of course Feynman had something to say about this:<p>&quot;You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you&#x27;re finished, you&#x27;ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let&#x27;s look at the bird and see what it&#x27;s doing — that&#x27;s what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.&quot;<p>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.

&quot;I should have loved biology but I found it to be a lifeless recitation of names&quot;<p>This is a common complaint when learning many subjects, and many teachers don&#x27;t explain why the names are needed.<p>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.<p>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?<p>To me, watching someone work who already mastered those languages in action can be very inspiring, even if haven&#x27;t reached that level of understanding yet.

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&#x27;s beautiful.<p>Over time I learned that if you can imagine some process, it&#x27;s likely you&#x27;ll find it somewhere in biology (keep the laws of physics in mind though ;)).

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.<p>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 &#x27;95 to build gene classifiers.<p>This seemed like a good area to work in (&quot;molecular biologists make $70K&#x2F;year!&quot;) 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&#x27;m terrible at). Postdoc as well- I was on my way to being a Professor of Biology. But, realistically, I couldn&#x27;t compete with high end postdocs and decided instead to go into industry as a computer scientist.<p>I&#x27;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&#x27;re solving the world&#x27;s problems. Biology has a huge hype problem- remember when it was promised that genomics was going to cure all human diseases?<p>I&#x27;ve dropped all biology and returned to computers (with some hardware hacking). It&#x27;s a real relief- everything makes sense, the engineering is straightforward, you can do it in your garage without contaminating all your surfaces.

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.<p>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.

&gt; 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.<p>This opening sentence resonated hard with me.<p>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.<p>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&#x27;t do that brilliantly. A total waste of time but sometimes you only learn by making quite expensive mistakes.<p>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.

This is a great article. I had the same realization some years back - this stuff is amazing! Why didn&#x27;t I get into it when I had a class on it? Of course, it&#x27;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??!!

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.<p>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&#x27;s explained really well in &quot;The Gene&quot; (hormonal gradients in the embryonic fluid). Author also mentions this.<p>Natural selection ... is our DNA some kind of cosmic RAM memory that stores all this information over millions of years?<p>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 &amp; nerves. It&#x27;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 ... &quot;evolved&quot;, out of a cosmic chemical soup, it&#x27;s just incomprehensible.<p>Biology, genes, brains are nothing short of amazing. I&#x27;m not a religious person but if something points to the existence of a god then you&#x27;ll find it in biology.

I&#x27;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&#x27;re dealing with.<p>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!<p>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.<p>All this to say, I&#x27;ve been researching others&#x27; 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!<p>But, how am i supposed to understand the studies, and papers, and drug mechanism of action sheets?<p>Do I start at ground 0 and start learning biology? What are some good resources?<p>And how do I know where to go from there?<p>All this is really troubling me and i feel so powerless.

Perhaps more interesting than learning that &quot;every cell in my body has the same DNA&quot; is learning that they <i>don&#x27;t</i>. Many mutations aren&#x27;t repaired and the result is &quot;mosaicism&quot; which turns out to be more common than was once thought, particularly for neurons since they are so long-lived:<p>Scientists Surprised to Find No Two Neurons Are Genetically Alike <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scientificamerican.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;scientists-surprised-to-find-no-two-neurons-are-genetically-alike&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scientificamerican.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;scientists-surpri...</a>

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.<p>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.

The thing that drove this home for me were the biovisions animations which got me to go back and basically learn high school biology.<p>Seeing the mechanical nature of gene transciption and chemical signaling blew my mind.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=7Hk9jct2ozY&amp;t=170" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=7Hk9jct2ozY&amp;t=170</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=LQmTKxI4Wn4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=LQmTKxI4Wn4</a><p>On the other hand, I don&#x27;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.

&gt; 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.<p>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&#x27;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 &#x27;willingness to be puzzled&#x27;.<p>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.

I love this article.<p>Does anyone have suggestions on starting down this path as someone that understands programming but has forgotten all the high school biology I learned?<p>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.<p>Is there anything similar that could start me down this path?<p>I&#x27;m less interested in videos like the Ninja Nerd. They look great, but it isn&#x27;t a way of learning that sticks with me.

I don&#x27;t know what I find more repellent about this article: the author&#x27;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 &quot;exoneration&quot; of Watson and Crick.

Speaking of biology ... I&#x27;m about 60% through the 720-page tome, <i>&#x27;Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst&#x27;</i> by Robert Sapolsky. &quot;Electrifying&quot; 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.<p>So far my only quibble is that Sapolsky cites the infamous &quot;priming&quot; study from <i>&#x27;Thinking, Fast and Slow&#x27;</i>, which the author, Daniel Kahneman, himself has retracted it elsewhere. This is forgivable, as the retraction from Kahneman (Feb 2017) and the release of <i>&#x27;Behave&#x27;</i> (May 2017) were too close. Though I&#x27;ll keep an eye for other transgressions.<p>Regardless of my quibbling, <i>&#x27;Behave&#x27;</i> 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.<p>Don&#x27;t let the page count discourage you—you&#x27;ll quickly warm up to Sapolsky&#x27;s loquacious writing style, peppered with tasteful humor and a deep love for science. And don&#x27;t skip the footnotes; plenty of interesting bits in there. (Get the hardcover edition if you can, it&#x27;s much less unwieldy during back-and-forth flipping, among other benefits.)

Biology is awesome!<p>But yeah, you might never get into it if it were taught to you as dry mumbo jumbo, like<p>Type 4 secretion system: ii- Pilus biogenesis<p>That&#x27;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!<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ihlFqOK5cZM" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ihlFqOK5cZM</a>

&gt;<i>Separate things of different sizes using gels and magnets. (“Gel electrophoresis.”)</i><p>Just a minor point, electrophoresis uses electric fields not magnetic fields - hence its name, &quot;electro-&quot; as opposed to &quot;magneto-&quot;.

Inspiring. His message doesn&#x27;t apply only to biology. Several subjects in schools are teached in an uninteresting manner that doesn&#x27;t captivate the students, and so they don&#x27;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.

This is about <i>molecular biology</i>, which is only one of many branches of <i>biology</i>.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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&#x27;m only scratching the surface.

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 &quot;biology&quot; and a number of relevant terms, mainly because an eminent Harvard page was linking to it.<p>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&#x27;d like to think someone managed to get their degree&#x2F;job based on stuff they learned on there.<p>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&#x27;s going to be many more. For all our advancements, we&#x27;re just part of a larger tapestry. Great subject.

Sometimes companies that sell proteins, enzymes, antibodies, etc. have good educational resources. I came across this company blog the other day:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.cellsignal.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.cellsignal.com&#x2F;</a><p>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:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cellsignal.com&#x2F;contents&#x2F;science&#x2F;cellular-landscapes&#x2F;science-landscapes" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cellsignal.com&#x2F;contents&#x2F;science&#x2F;cellular-landsca...</a>

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).<p>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.<p>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 :)

&gt; 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.<p>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.<p>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.

This virology course (1) made me start taking courses on Khan academy to understand cells (I don&#x27;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&#x27;m glad I found that virology course. This blog post strikes a cord with me.<p>My anguish for the worldwide state of education is abysmal. School and university are necessary, but the goal isn&#x27;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&#x27;re dumb and unintelligent.<p>You can be lucky sometimes and get a teacher who&#x27;s actually passionate about their subject AND is able to teach. Most teachers and professors I had were just I&#x27;m the system and mentally done. I can&#x27;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&#x27;t have become teachers or let near kids, but that&#x27;s the minority.<p>Anyway, I&#x27;m really glad the pandemic happened. Studying biology and physics at home has been rewarding and highly interesting. If only school and uni were&#x2F;had been the same...<p>(1): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;playlist?list=PLGhmZX2NKiNldpyRUBBEzNoWL0Cso1jip" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;playlist?list=PLGhmZX2NKiNldpyRUBBEz...</a>

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&#x2F;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.<p>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&#x27;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&#x27;s not what biology is all about.<p>Alas, I ended up not having a career in biology-related field though. I&#x27;m a programmer through-and-through. But I did meet my wife through these event so it&#x27;s not all for nothing, and I still like biology.

Reminds me of The Vital Question by Nick Lane. I highly recommend this book. I had that same sensation reading it: &quot;Man, why was high school biology so boring when it could have been like this?!&quot;<p>It&#x27;s about the role of energy in the emergence of life (pre-biotic -&gt; single-cell -&gt; multicellular -&gt; animals). You&#x27;ll see some chemical names, but it also tells interesting human stories too.

Those books recommended in the article look good but are expensive.<p>The Machinery of Life, David Goodsell<p>A Computer Scientist’s Guide to Cell Biology, William W. Cohen

Note that it&#x27;s not uncommon for an individual&#x27;s cells to differ in DNA. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;05&#x2F;21&#x2F;science&#x2F;mosaicism-dna-genome-cancer.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;05&#x2F;21&#x2F;science&#x2F;mosaicism-dna-gen...</a>

I am currently self-learning biology and I just completed MIT&#x27;s 7.00x introduction to biology on edX [1].<p>The course is outstanding and anything but a &quot;lifeless recitation of names&quot;. 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&#x2F;Cas9.<p>I&#x27;m looking to apply my ML expertise to the field of biology and this course was a real windfall, I highly recommend it.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.edx.org&#x2F;course&#x2F;introduction-to-biology-the-secret-of-life-3" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.edx.org&#x2F;course&#x2F;introduction-to-biology-the-secre...</a>

Beside the links provided in the article,<p>does anyone have any other articles, books, courses, lectures, youtubers, key people, papers, journals, interesting links&#x2F;talks&#x2F;podcasts&#x2F;quotes they&#x27;d like to share to help others on their journy to understand biology better?<p>Thank you!

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.<p>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&#x27;s all done, and I know the steps needed to make all this technology are also known.

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&#x2F;Dental school. So most students are NOT interested in the WHY but the How can I get an A.

Biology is awesome!<p>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?<p>I think I ended up reading 5 of her books. If you&#x27;re the kind of person who could pick up a book on physics just because you&#x27;re curious about the world, this will definitely appeal to you.

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.<p>Only in my 20s I read biography&#x27;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?<p>(1) Surely you&#x27;re joking mr Feynman<p>(2) The man who loved only numbers

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.

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.

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&#x27;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.

Great article. It covers many grounds - failings of school system, great reading recommendations, glimpse of biologist methods and inspirations for future tools.<p>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?

This is why people like Neil Degrasse Tyson and Carl Sagan are such a treasure. Our education system rewards memorization so that&#x27;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.

I resonate greatly with this article and am inspired to do something that I&#x27;ve been putting off for a long time, which is to start a youtube channel explaining cell&#x2F;molecular biology&#x2F;immunology topics to general public. What would some interesting questions to tackle first in such a channel?

There are some community biology groups:<p>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&#x27;m sure there are lots of others.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.boslab.org&#x2F;about" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.boslab.org&#x2F;about</a>

I did like biology but at the time couldn&#x27;t connect it with the impact the field creates in human living.<p>today I&#x27;m obsessed with understanding proteins because predicting protein structure, behaviour, interaction are really hard problems that would unlock huge medical advances if fully solved

this is my favorite blogger<p>his &#x27;there&#x27;s a gold rush on and I&#x27;m the shovel&#x27; article about his decision to leave programming for writing has always stuck with me<p>and nothing he&#x27;s written since then has betrayed that voice (especially the post on &#x27;you&#x27;re using the wrong dictionary&#x27;)

&quot;Enormous subjects are best approached in thin, deep slices&quot; - 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?

The author pretty much summed up the epiphany I had, which was pretty much &quot;Holy crap, that is a self contained biological programming language&quot; It got a lot more interesting for me when I had that aha moment.

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.

In school I was good at physics and chemistry, but bad at biology and history.<p>I have the feeling it being <i>&quot;a lifeless recitation of names&quot;</i> was the reason, yes.

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.

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.

Most people don&#x27;t because biology is hard.

Big problem with the field of biology, like Peter Thiel says, is it&#x27;s the science field people go into to avoid math.

computing will become biology and biology will become computing.

life is a &quot;a big slop of global mutable state&quot; :)

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.

Biology was my first love; But I ended as Computer hacker :)