stevestory
Posts: 13407
Joined: Oct. 2005
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While this might seem off topic, I think this exchange on /. will be familiar to those of us here. The first guy roughly equates to the UD perspective, the second guy equates to scientists who actually know what they're talking about.
First guy, quoting the Yale story I put on the Science Break thread:
| Quote | | Quote | | In the last several years, scientists have discovered that non-coding regions of the genome, far from being junk, contain thousands of regulatory elements that act as genetic "switches" to turn genes on or off. |
...Biologists discover "flags". Seriously, these guys should just bring a programmer on-staff — preferably assembly, as decoding the arcane secrets of all Earth life should be a breeze for anyone whose day job involves the x86 instruction set. |
Second guy:
| Quote | Biologists discover "flags". Seriously, these guys should just bring a programmer on-staff -- preferably assembly, as decoding the arcane secrets of all Earth life should be a breeze for anyone whose day job involves the x86 instruction set.
[Sigh] Every time a biology story is posted on /. it seems like we get a bunch of posts along the lines of "dumb biologists, any techie would have figured that out a long time ago!"
Please don't confuse the reality with the dumbed-down versions that appear in the popular press or the even more dumbed-down summaries. Bioinformatics, which is what I do, has been an established science for over a decade, and I can assure you that computer scientists have been working with biologists for a lot longer than that. Most of the obvious computational analogies have already been thought of -- and most, unfortunately, have had to be discarded. Despite some of the superficial similarities, genomes are not programs, at least not in the way CS people use the word. They're more like a collection of heuristics, and even that way of thinking about things breaks down when you start looking at the details.
I'm more on the CS/math/stat side of things, and my colleagues on the bio side are often mystified by what I do -- but I'm equally often mystified by what they do. Both CS and biology are tremendously complex fields, and if you think you can arbitrarily apply lessons learned from one field to the other, you will almost always turn out to be wrong. Biologists and computer scientists can learn a lot from working with each other; work in one field very often leads to advances in the other; and by all means (he says, with a healthy dollop of self-interest) the areas of collusion should continue to grow. But thinking that there's some natural equivalence in one field to what you know from the other is simply a mistake. |
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