The headwinds are persistent: credentialism and a glut of PhDs that are way more qualified than me. I'm constantly meeting bio people going the other way - into tech.
Despite that, I'm stubbornly going to keep going because like you say, the potential of Biotech to reduce human suffering seems so much greater.
I worry about becoming pigeonholed by my background, or falling into the many pitfalls you point out like screwed up incentives or narrow funding paths. More than anything, I want to work on something important and meaningful, like a disease.
Roughly speaking, my current idea is to learn the basics which I'm in the process of doing now [1], get basic credentials, and then find data on causes of suffering, take the first derivative, sort descending, and go. I know it's naive, but it seems like the right thing to do.
Basic research with no concrete plannable payoff is not exactly what private business is good at. Food for thought, Silicon Valley is based on unlimited debt-based government R&D spending during WWII, private investors only came later to an already fertile field that had lots of very concrete results to show: https://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xo
So no, I don't feel guilty for anything. And despite the general feeling, not everyone in here is trying to build the next Facebook. We're just ordinary guys trying to make a (comfortable) living.
Last but not least, you make it sound like a smartass hacker could discover the cure for cancer or Alzheimer. It's not that easy. If pharmaceutical companies with decades of considerable funding and teams of hundreds of highly specialized scientists haven't figured it out what makes you think that we could? We're smart, sure, but not that smart.
Perhaps the real market opportunity is in facilitating this kind of research, rather than just digging another mine.
Do you know what website you are on? It’s closer to 9.5, I think.
Investors that invested into yet another Linux startup in the dot com boom had a high chance of failure - but those business all tried to be RedHat, not something completely unknown. And the subject of the business was an operating system, not something unknown. Your bet is on execution and the market, not on some yet unknown product.
> It's time to invest and avidly pursue a new wave of technological solutions to this problem - including those that are risky, unproven, even unlikely to work.
I don’t think you’ve really thought this argument through.
And no, you did not think this through, or you are just grossly uninformed.
Example: https://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xo
Private business only takes paths that are already visible. No investor spends money on the truly unknown.
You can downvote all you want as the small person you show yourself to be through it, facts will still remain facts not open to voting.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: unfortunately it looks like you've frequently been uncivil in HN comments. We ban accounts that do that, so can you please review the guidelines and not do that anymore?
Oh and by he way, I could not care less about some stupid "ban". First, it's not like I need anything from you or this site, second, I don't think it works. Not that I would have any reason to try to create new accounts, because seriously, who cares, I just find it frustratingly silly - STUPID - that you threaten me with a ban.
Furthermore, I don't agree that I was uncivil, not now, not in the past.
Am very interested in talking about the field w/ pretty much anyone though. It has remained quite near to my heart.
Another major problem is that medical schools don't require serious math. I genuinely believe the single best way to advance health care would be to make linear algebra a pre-requisite for medical school.
They gather enough information that they can classify a patient into a storyline and they follow that storyline. If someone adds a new complication to the storyline, they adopt that. If the patient lives, they are happy. If the patient dies, they are sad.
Trying to explain to them that we have, today, the tools to concretely rethink all the data about cancer or infectious disease, or inflammatory conditions, or all the above, in innumerable ways, simply escapes them.
You can tell them you're funded and have petabytes of data and they just smile and nod and say "Oh, well, start with something small and build up."
I say this as a board-certified specialist. My colleagues drive me nuts. And the more powerful (read, "senior") they are, the less they understand.
What's the percentage of non-EOL people that die of cancer?
I'm personally more worried about things like dementia
[0] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/news/11532982/Dement...
(Long term treatments of course is another thing - that's why we have expensive daily tablets for malaria, but no vaccine. More profitable to charge $1/day than charge $50 for a one-off vaccine)
Pfizer have pulled out of neuroscience research completely, Saracatinib (from AstraZeneca) was a failed cancer drug before someone thought "hey lets try this on dementia"
We live at a time when many believe that if there was just enough money and work going into we could eliminate all ailments and be living to 200, if not outright headed towards a Kurzweilian future - which is seemingly radically more far off as the years pass. But I can't help but consider that this optimism is happening at the same time that we can't manage to cure the common cold. And many of the most revolutionary steps we've had in medicine happened many decades and most often by purely serendipitous happening -- and not directed and heavily funded research.
For instance chemotherapy is still the front line treatment for cancer and its discovery came when a couple of doctors noticed that victims of mustard gas in the first World War had surprisingly low immune cell counts. As another example penicillin, the first and father of all antibiotics, was also discovered completely by accident. A scientist accidentally left a petri dish containing some bacteria open. It had been contaminated by some mold from a nearby window, but that mold seemed to have inhibited the bacterial expansion. Lo and behold, antibiotics emerge as a byproduct of mold on rotting decay. It took years for that discovery to be accepted even after the discovery had published and spoken about as much as he could. Probably because it's defies all intuition and is certainly not a path anybody would have ever intentionally gone down, except with hindsight. Vaccines? Similar story. Hey I noticed all these milk maids, that have caught cow pox before, are immune to small pox for some reason. Do other people become immune if exposed to cow pox? Cool, they do!
By contrast, medical progress in recent decades has been extremely asymptotic. Perhaps this could be because we've only spent $x trillion instead of $x+$y trillion, but it could also mean that we are simply hitting a genuine asymptote where we'll continue to be able to make progress but will see ever smaller returns. The current era of extreme optimism is also hardly new. A couple of decades ago nanotechnology was going to be an imminent breakthrough that would cure practically anything, and even revolutionize matter itself. And genetic engineering has been creating promises since its advent. In the decades of promises there the most we really ended up with was some crops genetically engineered to resist an herbicide, which invasive herbs also naturally grew rapidly resistant to. Cas9? We can wait a few years, but I strongly suspect I'll be able to add it onto the nanotechnology pile of 'just around the corner' revolutionary breakthroughs, but they're just around the corner in the same way that the end of MC Escher's stairwells are also just around the corner.
You're not going to find plentiful jobs in biotech. And starting up a new company is nowhere near as easy as it is in tech. I know almost no one from school that got into it. The one person I do know is working on genomic sequencing for race horses..
I hate to say it, but it really needs steady/consistent government funding - both training students and supporting companies. We could be way further along in biotech overall if there were actually a good number of us working on it. No sane investor is going to put money into R&D that will end up failing 9/10 times. And even if you hit on something, the healthcare system is so jacked, recouping your costs are just as hard as developing the product.