I will just link to my previous comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21799204

The barrier of entry to biology is artificially high due to all sorts of reasons, mostly regulatory. Biohacking is often frowned upon on the federal level and the equipment is expensive. Even with stuff like OpenTrons, we are talking about several magnitudes higher costs than e.g. Arduino and a breadboard kit. What exists of open biology is often tied up with drug culture, both the legal and illegal variety. The latter needs no explanation and the former is stuff like Four Thieves Vinegar that tries to break the FDA-endorsed establishment. It is an embarrassment to the field that what exists of amateur biology mostly stands in the shadow of illegitimacy.

The pioneer of Crispr application in humans has just been thrown into jail and vilified in the press. Most of the scientific community, while not publicly praising, are silently in agreement with the decision. The few condemnations comes from bioengineers, your classic biologists are more than happy to play the "wait and see" game. Nobody is willing to actually engage with society at large with regards to the issue. There is no Space X, there is no Google in biology. Your established pharmaceutical companies are more than happy to play gatekeeper and rent-seek instead of shattering regulatory capture. They are not interested in pushing back the state, they would rather play the revolving door game. How many "prominent" biologists have you heard of whom built a single company that achieved unicorn status? Look at the biology "entrepreneurs". Classic academia-private partnerships. There is no fresh blood, no vision, no Tesla. More public relations effort is being put into "immortality tech" companies like Ambrosia and Calico than existing state of the art technologies. Apparently it is more "publicly acceptable" to inject young people's blood into your veins to live longer than to perform an experimental procedure on infants to potentially cure HIV.

Your average university graduate with a degree in the sciences can finish their biology component through memorization. This is the way the current system is structured and it is not likely to change soon. The talent in biology that does not go to medical school is being lost to software engineering. It is easier to make money in ad-tech than trying to cure cancer. Why bother working in the field when "shipping" can take decades because of red tape and experiments on non-human mamallian animals are tightly-regulated till almost the point of uselessness? Agriculture gets more leeway with animals on an unimaginably large scale and magnitude than your average university lab. Lab-on-chips and organoids are great for press releases and glossy magazine covers, but they are far from production-quality. Even lab-grown meat is not production-quality yet. The mush you get isn't even worth putting into meatballs, forget lab-grown filet mignons. The current tech is essentially the same old rehash on plant protein, bean curd/tofu has been used to make vegetarian meat substitutes in places like Asia for centuries. Impossible food made it "hip". To translate it into HN-speak: Impossible Foods to vegetarian meat is what Docker is to BSD jails. The tech community is able to reason through the costs and benefits of backdoors in encryption, but when it comes to animal rights there is nothing but emotional-fueled hysteria about perceived abuse and mistreatment. The next time a family member suffers in hospital from an incurable disease, just remember the donation you made to the local animal rights campaign helped hinder biological research and development by decades. Let's hope the animals' "thoughts and prayers" are with you. After all, they certainly are conscious enough to benefit from legal protections and funding.

You lament about the state of public biological understanding? Talk to the powers that be. How many people believe in free energy and try to put it into practice? Perpetual motion machines are easily debunked. You don't see rampant exploitation of the ignorant and vulnerable by free energy believers on the same scale as the anti-vaccination movement. The same can't be said for biology. How many craft beer brewers actually understand what goes on inside? The next time you go to your local bar, ask around. That will give a pretty clear idea of what is the current level of biology education.

Edit: why the downvotes? If biology makes you uncomfortable, then take time to learn it. After all, isn't this the infamous HN response to a lot of problems? "Learn to code"?

The "pioneer of Crispr" got 3 years for endangering human lives, which is pretty much a slap on the wrist. I would've done more, and I'm one of those "bioengineers" you talk about. Unsanctioned human experimentation isn't something we should applaud.

As for animal experiments, they are not nearly as difficult to get going as people think, SOPs for mice take a month on average to get approved in my experience. The vast majority of my dislike towards animal testing lies in the realm of cosmetics, not animals, and I'm sure most people would agree. Even so, the trend in research now is to move away from traditional animal models to organ-on-chips, simulations, and other human substitute models.

Finally, Biology is SLOW. You haven't seen a "unicorn" because an MVP for a biotech company in therapeutics is 10 years away from when it starts needing funding, in a lot of cases. There are very few options for series A-B funds to fill the gap between seed and revenue stages for biotech startups, which is why licensing and partnerships between researchers and industry are the predominant options seen today, alongside the traditional NIH/DARPA/NSF funds.

Maybe I'm biased because of my location (huge Biotech hub) and affiliations, but anytime I read complaints about biotech and medicine from software devs it reads like ignorance from people who are used to "moving fast and breaking things".

And there it is. The first assumption is that my background is in CS and not biology, that I do not understand the nature of your deeply mysterious arts. You yourself hang out on HN, I hope the irony isn't lost. This whole attitude is exactly why there is no decent seed funding for biology. Too conservative, too risk-adverse. The ivory tower knows best. The obsession with "better to die from cancer than from an untested treatment". It took decades for Right to Try to become reality and still there is tremendous opposition. Let's leave the orphan drug rent-seeking to private equity funds. Individual researchers should "know their place" and thrive only in the generosity and largesse of pharmaceutical giants. It is no wonder people are losing faith in the biological sciences. When computing is bringing breakthrough after breakthroughs, what has biology given us? Some new materials? Marginally improved treatments? How many magnitude level improvements have you seen? Where is my iPhone? Where are my VR goggles? Most if not all improvements are slow incremental gains built on the blood, sweat, and tears of poorly-paid phds who will be lucky to get paid 6 figures after graduation. It is easy to "look back on the decade" and pat yourself on the back, celebrating the oh-so-vast gains. The gains in biology hardly holds a candle to how much computing has advanced. The field of electronics has gotten cheaper than ever. Yet in biology, just how many people do you think have access to say, cryogenic electron microscopy? This isn't on Stanford light source level of difficulty, but there has been no effort at all to democratise the technology. Your ML researchers have access to ASICs for computing mere months after they get designed, both actual hardware and in the cloud. Tons of funding and development being put into improving developer user experience. Can you say the same for biology? The amount of "data processing" for a cryo microscope is trivial by modern cloud standards. Where are the Raspberry Pis, the Arduinos, of biology? Where are the cheap microscopy equipment clones? Because there is no market. There is no demand for biology.

Looking at computing vs biology as two fields is disingenuous, given that computing hasn't been around long enough to stagnate, although looking at ML research it is slowing down significantly. Computing is slowing down advancement as well, with silicon-based systems reaching their limit.

What has biotech given us? Cheap portable HIV testing for developing countries, non-invasive targeted treatment of various cancers, (Magnitude level). If you don't see gains in the bioengineering space you aren't looking hard enough, and you also aren't taking into account the FDA scrutinizing new technologies and treatments before they are released into the wild.

The assumption is you don't have a bio background because you have no idea why progress is slow. I'm wondering what kind of bio background you do have where time isn't an issue. Sure I can spin up a bunch of GPUs on demand to train my image classifier, but what I'm training it on is months of experiments run non-stop, and that's with a relatively quick animal model.

>The barrier of entry to biology is artificially high due to all sorts of reasons, mostly regulatory. Considering the nature of the placebo affect and the difference between feeling better and being better, I am skeptical of pulling down many of the barriers to DIY biology. Forgive me if I am misunderstanding and making a straw-man here, but we already have therapies that do not work, such as acupuncture or a wide range of So Called Alternative Medicines. "Stem cell" treatments that are outright fraud already exist [0,1]. My fear is that this will be replicated with CRISPR technology. Personally, I would like treatments that work and am skeptical that the market could decide what's best (I don't think this is the argument that you are making, but I want to address it nonetheless). The CRISPR babies that I believe you were referring to are an example of needing regulations. One rogue doctor made changes to their genome that are not preventative. This was incredibly shoddy work that should not be applauded [6]. I would also argue that the barrier is not artificially high. Doing biological research is incredibly difficult. Unlike with your analogy to Tesla, people can die from treatments [2]. Additionally,with CRISPR there are off target affects that need to be understood before wide scale use [3]. There is great promise in biotech [4,5]. However, the consequence are not just billion dollar explosions, but lives. I may be over dramatizing, but I think a careful approach is important. Also, the increments are still progress. Could there be another way to approach this kind of research, absolutely! There I think you hit on something very important. My bio graduate education did not at all prepare me for any kind of business thinking. > remember the donation you made to the local animal rights campaign helped hinder biological research and development by decades I think this is a little over dramatic, but I agree with the feeling without really knowing if this has been studied.

[0] https://www.nature.com/news/stem-cell-ruling-riles-researche... [1] https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/more-stem-cell... [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/43977 [3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31911131 [4] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/11/boy-rare-disease-get... [5] https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/8/360/360ra134.full [6] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/08/did-crispr-help-or-h...

Trying to teach the science behind vaccines, climate change, HIV/AIDS, or any other common denial topic is a losing battle. There will always be a new conspiracy theory to believe in. Knock one common denial argument down and 10 spring up to take its place.

We actually need to focus on teaching trust in scientists and the scientific method. You can't reasonably expect people to understand all these complex modern innovations and concepts to the level where they can easily identify hoaxes. You can expect people to realize who the experts in each field are and find the consensus among their opinions.

How do they determine who the experts are? The conspiracy theorists always claim to be scientists that use the scientific method to come to their conclusions.

You're being downvoted, but this meta-level problem really is the problem to solve. How do you identify experts? How do you choose when to defer to experts and when to play it by ear? More generally, how do you decide how to make decisions?

I've thought about this a lot, but there's really no way to get around the fact that you'll draw insane conclusions if you start from insane priors. And you're kinda forced into having insane priors if your parents believe insane things. Either we force people to make the right decisions (as decided by [insert favourite entity here]), or we live with some people doing batshit insane things. Those are the extremes of a spectrum that includes many only slightly forceful interventions, but in a nutshell, that's the choice we have.

Science is about being falsifiable. You can prove many things with a battery, several magnets, and a coil of wire. Non-organic chemistry is similarly easy to demonstrate, even the most ardent of science-deniers would hesitate to dip their fingers into aqua regia, should you tell them what it is. But when it comes to biology and organic chemistry, things are completely different. Let's not talk about controversial scientific questions like microwave radiation effects on DNA. Simple stuff like "catching a cold". How many people do you know believe that it's a function of the weather? Sure, there may be a correlation with cold temperatures which has been proven, but the existence of viruses and the fact that they cause colds is basic science. We teach children the ideas behind splitting the atom and unleashing the metaphorical Death of the Bhagavad Gita. In other words, your average high school kid has a decent idea of what may cause Armageddon, the difference between a compressive and a "gun" type. But how many can tell you how influenza viruses work? There is a huge problem with our current approach to biology, bioengineering, and biotechnology education. Influenza kills a lot more every year, regardless of how often blog.nuclearsecrecy.com shows up and gets upvoted on HN.

> The conspiracy theorists always claim to be scientists that use the scientific method to come to their conclusions

That’s fine. It’s a free country. Their kids just don’t have a birthright to putting the public at risk. If they mostly stay at home, the damage is done; but it’s limited.

The other option, having the government override parents’ wishes around medical treatment, is rife with risk.

Vaccines worked really well saving ~1 billion lives, but caused people to forget why they are so critical.

It’s a really common issue. The better a system works the faster people forget about it’s upsides while the downsides are more obvious.

Like democracy and capitalism.

Religion

That is not correct. While SOME religions teach this, not the majority.

Marin County, which is not a hot bed of any religion other than yoga pants, EV, soylent drinks etc, is the largest population of anti-vaxxers in California.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...

Anti-Vaxx is a cult. So it is the GP is most decidedly correct.

Also seeing right through some unscientific nonsense does not protect you from all of it.

There are people who laugh at Creationism and then turn around and deny Anthropogenic Global Warming. Others laugh at both creationists and AGW denialists, and then tout Health At Every Size. And there are people who reject vaccines despite being perfectly able to accept scientific evidence in the other mentioned areas.

I think people are really starting to see the cracks in the system. The government, the media, the emperor has no clothes. But people don't really know what to do, so it pops out in weird ways like telling the people who want to force you to get a vaccine to shove it.

> telling the people who want to force you to get a vaccine to shove it

This article targets educated children trying to escape the damage of their parents’ decisions.

Nobody is forcing anyone to do anything to their bodies. It is the parents who are going against not only their childrens’ interests but also their preferences.

Missouri does and I think their approach should be Nationwide

Children don't get to decide. They're children.

Parents don't get to decide to abuse their children or endanger their health. They have a duty of care to their children.

I support vaccination. My daughter is fully vaccinated. Barring fringe health issues, children should be vaccinated. End of story.

But that's entirely besides the point. The point I'm making is I believe people are feeling "squeezed," that our public sense-makers have been revealed to be nonsense. Look at what's been going on. We're in the longest war in our history. The state tortured people and nothing happened. We are spied on and nothing happens. Government bails out Wall Street in the Great Recession but not Main Street. We elected a reality TV show host to be the President. We were told for years that our reality TV host president was a literal Manchurian candidate and our government had been essentially overthrown by a foreign dictator. Every time I turn around someone's shooting up a crowd of people. There's cracks in the walls. Not vaccinating is a symptom. The core problem is that the "system" lacks credibility. Squeezing people a little harder and forcing them to vaccinate exacerbates the core problem. It would be great if everyone were robots and could just look at cold hard facts and make totally rational decisions, but that's not how it works. Squeezing people in one place causes them to lash out in another place. I don't think it's a good idea.

...and yet when it matters, people keep voting for more boot in the face :(

Look what happened to Bernie in 2016. I think was a demonstration that the "system" only gives you two choices: size 10 boot or size 12 boot. I vowed never to vote for a Democrat again until this whole generation washes/ages out.

Every major outbreak that the news media exploded about in the past decades - bird flu, swine flu, etc. Every one I got, had a little fever for a few days, and then continued my life as if nothing happened. So why would I get vaccinated?

One argument in favor that I hear is 'herd immunity'; getting vaccinated to protect those who can't get vaccinated and are otherwise at great risk to their health.

When playing Russian Roulette, surviving a pull of the trigger does not form evidence that it is safe to pull the trigger again.

The flu can be as gentle as a common cold, but it can also kill you. It doesn’t kill most people or it’d be as vilified as Ebola, but it’s always on the table. And that goes for any weaker immune systems around you. In a world where we’re urged to protect against this and that, this easily falls under an 80/20 sort of benefit. Easy to do, lots of protection society wide for doing so.

What vaccinations do you take and why? There is a vaccination for malaria, but not everyone takes that. Is that unethical? Some states vaccinate for polio, some don’t. Who is right?

In my view, every vaccine is choice with a risk, cost, and reward.

Depending on how prevalent a disease is society can either force everyone to take the vaccine risk for herd immunity, or allow people to make their own choices.

If people are allowed to choose, generally speaking parents decide for their children. It would be fairly sad to allow a child to to self vaccinate, then have them die from developing a complication when we know that children make poor long term risk/reward decisions.

True but some are causing problems right now. https://www.bbc.com/news/health-50659893

I'm in New Zealand we have an outbreak at present, largely due to fear around vacinations in middle to upper class families. It's crazy.

This article is deliberately misleading you.

Here are WHO statistics which show immunization rates in New Zealand (which are higher than they have ever been before)...

https://www.who.int/immunization/monitoring_surveillance/dat...

Here are WHO statistics which show incidences of vaccine-preventable diseases in New Zealand (there is no notable increase)...

http://apps.who.int/immunization_monitoring/globalsummary/in...

I was going to reply saying the same thing. Here is a Stats NZ breakdown:

http://archive.stats.govt.nz/browse_for_stats/snapshots-of-n...

The loony anti-vax middle class need to be watched to prevent a future outbreak, but given the numbers it is hard to argue they are responsible for this one.

Interesting I'd assumed the recent outbreak (https://www.health.govt.nz/your-health/conditions-and-treatm...) was due to a drop in vaccinations, I stand corrected.

I am all for forcing people to vaccinate for the good of all, but if we are going to allow people to pick and choose in general then it’s reasonable to allow adults to choose for their children.