Re:Verge Genomics (YC S15) Wants to Cure Neurodegenerative D...
by toufka on Tuesday July 21, 2015 @05:00PM
(#9925777)
"Garbage in, garbage out", or, "give me enough degrees of freedom and I can fit an elephant". It's a reasonable retort given what's on display here.
On the other hand, if you do collect enough data in a particular domain to be able to call some interesting targets, it's straight-forward enough to validate the method. To presume generality (as the scientists probably do not, though as the article and every writeup I've seen here do) is surely foolhardy.
As a side note, if the company wishes to pretty much sell to 'big pharma', why then do they publish these touchy-feely tech-crunch articles at all? Their website is designed for all those web-2.0 ideals of retaining customers and click-through and responsiveness, etc. But I doubt Roche cares about any of those things...
Re:Verge Genomics (YC S15) Wants to Cure Neurodegenerative D...
by et2o on Tuesday July 21, 2015 @05:34PM
(#9925985)
This isn't 100% wrong, but it's definitely close. To out it vaguely, there is enormous complexity and structure that we can't even model yet.
When will people understand the problem with genomics isn't complexity, it is a lack of raw data.
We simply have not collected enough annotation on what every gene does and how it interacts. Without that information, you have diddly-squat.