
When physics meets biology: a less known Feynman - sohkamyung
https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.03854
======
oli5679
There was a really good chapter on his time in a biology lab in his book,
"Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman". I have always remembered this quote:

 _When it came time for me to give my talk on the subject, I started off by
drawing an outline of the cat and began to name the various muscles.

The other students in the class interrupt me: "We know all that!"

"Oh," I say, "you do? Then no wonder I can catch up with you so fast after
you've had four years of biology." They had wasted all their time memorizing
stuff like that, when it could be looked up in fifteen minutes._

~~~
ItsMe000001
I've been taking medical and biology related courses for the last five years
or so, well over 1000 hours in lecture hours thus far - thanks to the Internet
_(a counterpoint to the "I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet
Anymore" thread popular on HN right now)_. I concluded that while I find it
all extremely interesting and exciting as far as anatomy, physiology,
neuroscience, organic and biochemistry, genetics, statistics (which I had
learned - and forgotten - before but now I actually found useful and therefore
interesting for the first time), etc., I could never study medicine to become
a doctor. All that rote learning!

For a CS graduate, it's like learning everything there is about Oracle 9i. For
years. By heart. Not even about databases in general, you learn the basics of
course, but then you spend most of your time learning by heart every command
and every setting of Oracle 9i.

I'm sure it makes you an efficient doctor within the given system, and when
trying to solve some example cases there sure is value in knowing pathways
(real ones, e.g. neurological ones - where is the damage if the patient feels
this and does not feel any of that?, as well as biochemical ones, but also
organizational stuff like various ways invented to categorize broken bones,
e.g.
[http://www.thieme.com/media/samples/pubid1252333231.pdf](http://www.thieme.com/media/samples/pubid1252333231.pdf)).
Quite frankly, I find most of it a waste of time.

Right now I'm re-taking edX "Principles of Biochemistry"
([https://www.edx.org/course/principles-biochemistry-
harvardx-...](https://www.edx.org/course/principles-biochemistry-harvardx-
mcb63x-1)), and while it's a lot of fun I also feel it's quite a bit of a
waste: From part III on it feels more and more useless. The course is done
very well, and every bit is interesting, but how - WHY - am I supposed to
learn soooo many paths in such great detail? What's the point? If I need it I
can always look it up! No wonder that while there are several "Hello I'm new
here, excited to start this course" messages in the forum every day there are
only a handful of forum messages for the later sections of the course - after
many months of running. I suspect >90% of people never get past part 3 (of 5).
Because the brain just does not see the point of all this rote learning. If
there was a larger project as context, a problem to solve! But just "here
learn this" for no other reason than "it's interesting" (so are a trillion
other pieces of information!!)... it does not work very well.

Learning needs both a PUSH and a PULL. The teaching is mostly about push(ing
knowledge into brains), but where is the pull (reasons other than abstract
"you need to know")? Brain have their own ways of detecting actual need, and
that comes from having to solve actual problems, not from being told "this is
important". And learning millions of facts when you don't need them but know
you can always learn them/look them up quickly at any time when you do
actually need them is soooo demotivating.

~~~
chatmasta
Yeah, totally with you on that. I knew lots of pre-Med majors in college and I
could never wrap my head around how someone could enjoy such a masochistic
form of learning. But the common thread of successful pre-Med majors is that
they get straight A’s and are very successful memorizing everything.

Medicine is basically all rote memorization, from pre-Med to the MCAT. It
makes sense to select for doctors who are good at it, because they need to
have a quickly queryable, but wide breadth of knowledge in their head at all
times.

Personally I’m happy to know that my doctor is able to memorize and collate so
much information. But I do worry that the way he learns may also restrict his
creativity and problem solving.

Perhaps as AI moves into medicine, doctors won’t need to rely so much on their
own memorization, and can focus their efforts on problem solving.

~~~
sykh
I think you underestimate the role of problem solving skill in medicine. It’s
not all rote memorization. A good doctor is good at problem solving and has to
have lots of information ready for instant recall.

------
mlechha
Not a very good abstract. It doesn't tell me anything about Feynman's
contribution to molecular biology.

~~~
Ultimatt
Very little. He did some work on what would now be called mutational
"recovery" of frame shift insertion/deletion variants in phages, for about a
year on sabbatical. Which at the time would have been enough for him to have
predicted several aspects about the genetic code, such as DNA triplets forming
codons. Which was funnily enough anticipated by George Gamow around the same
time looking at the number of naturally occurring amino acids and the number
of nucleobases.

------
mncharity
OT, but if you like quantitative biology, there's
[http://bionumbers.hms.harvard.edu/](http://bionumbers.hms.harvard.edu/) . The
book draft "Cell Biology by the Numbers" there is also fun.

------
rumcajz
Even Alan Turing have done some biology-related work:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chemical_Basis_of_Morphoge...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chemical_Basis_of_Morphogenesis)

~~~
Ultimatt
Yeah which is waaaay more significant both in the field of chemistry and
biology. The work Turing was doing at that time was seriously advanced
thinking, and really on the right track for how things like transcriptional
regulation works in embryogenesis. If he had lived longer its really
depressing to imagine what he might have contributed in biology, and how much
faster we would have got to where we are in molecular biology. Unlike this
write up on Feynman, Turing genuinely provided a hypothesis with some insight
and rigour that turned out to be important. It was first found to be a real
thing in the world in chemistry with the discovery of the Belousov–Zhabotinsky
reaction, which then directly tied the maths to an actual reactive process.
The way biology works is a bit more digital and discrete, but the general idea
and concept is similar. Turing couldn't have anticipated that his ideas on
computation were probably even closer to biology than his differential rate
equation models. If he had lived to see the evidence of the tie ins between
his works, I think he would have dropped some seriously epic stuff we cant
even imagine right now for dealing mathematically with molecular biology at
various scales.

------
xevb3k
Having recently learnt that Feynman seems to have treated women quite badly
[1]. I feel slightly uncomfortable about this article, it feels more like hero
worship than anything else.

Feynman no doubt did some interesting work in Physics. But the work discussed
here doesn’t appear to be particularly distinguished. It does not follow that
someone did interesting work on X therefore everything they did must be
valuable and interesting.

I suppose what I’m trying to say is that individuals are a complex mixture of
good and bad. And that there’s a danger that an individual who has done
interesting work in one area is seen as a universal genius, and an ideal to be
emulated. This unfortunately is not the case.

[1] [https://restructure.wordpress.com/2009/08/07/sexist-
feynman-...](https://restructure.wordpress.com/2009/08/07/sexist-feynman-
called-a-woman-worse-than-a-whore/) for example...

~~~
chatmasta
To play devils advocate and give him the benefit of the doubt... wasn’t the
1950’s a much different time in terms of respect for women?

Reading that excerpt, I got the sense he was writing from the perspective of
his past-self, in an almost self-deprecating way. He’s citing that incident of
an extreme example of how literally he would follow instructions. By choosing
it as an extreme example, he’s effectively acknowledging that the attitude was
disrespectful / wrong.

Granted I haven’t read the whole book, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there is
some crucial context missing from those excerpts.

Feynman did, after all, write the words himself.

~~~
icebraining
Having read the book, I didn't get the impression he was criticizing himself.
It read as just another story of an experiment, which how it seems he
approached most of life (and which is what makes the book interesting, in my
opinion).

