

Biology is boring for most people... unless viewed as algorithm design? - amichail

Most people probably don't care about the inner workings of biological processes unless there are ideas there that can be applied in non-biological contexts.<p>So why not focus on biology as inspiration for algorithm design in high school?
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bbgm
That's a rather sweeping generalization. I know way more people interested in
the inner workings of biological processes than in algorithm design (myself
included). It depends on whom you hang out with :)

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notaddicted
Just because algorithm design is interesting and biology is boring to you,
doesn't mean it is the same for everyone else.

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Mongoose
I for one would have liked the algorithmic nature of biology to at least have
been _mentioned_ during my high school's two-year IB bio series. I've been
reading up on computational biology lately and am mulling over the idea of
pursuing research in it. I feel that if my high school biology teacher had
spent some time focusing on the computational nature of the field, I would
have sooner discovered my interest in CS and potentially made more headway by
now.

However, I agree with bbgm. Many (if not most) people would prefer the way
biology is currently taught. I'd argue that only a minority of hacker-minded
kids would benefit from a computational approach.

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bbgm
Computational biology is still a very young field, and even a lot of
biologists don't quite appreciate the computational aspects. However as Leroy
Hood says, biology is fast becoming a digital science and our education around
biology has to change.

Here's a paper around recent thinking, especially among the comp bio
community, in this area

[http://bioinformatics.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/20/14/2...](http://bioinformatics.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/20/14/2159)

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Mongoose
Thanks for the link. Here's a paper on natural computing that overviews the
various aspects of CS + biology. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=844150>

