
Interview with Matt Might - michaelsbradley
http://www.pl-enthusiast.net/2016/03/24/interview-matt-might/
======
tbenst
Matt is an incredible human being. I reached out to Matt (as a stranger) on
behalf of a relative with a rare genetic disorder and was humbled by his
support and generosity.

Matt is a true mensch and a hero in rare disease diagnosis. What words I have
are insufficient to express my deep admiration and appreciation. Well worth
your time to read a bit about Matt's work.

~~~
agumonkey
I wish his endeavor with government support will yield interesting pragmatic
advances.

~~~
nextos
There's _a lot_ of really basic modelling of genes that can be done for rare
Mendelian diseases using formal language theory which is surprisingly not
there yet.

I am working closely with some Genomics England people (100k genomes, many
from rare disease patients), and as someone with a pure CS background but also
some years of biology the rather primitive state of the art never ceases to
amaze me.

Matt mentions pi-calculus, but much more basic things are not there yet!

~~~
agumonkey
I'd love to read more about that, is there any public document about your work
?

ps: it seems like another point for polymathy.

~~~
nextos
Nope, but we will have a Nature paper out quite soon.

If you want some info, ping me. Contact email is on my profile.

I think we desperately need some startups in this arena that lean towards open
knowledge. I know some very well funded ones in stealth mode which are
producing pretty awful and closed prediction models. I don't want a future
where my doctor uses information coming from a blackbox.

The point about polymaths is good indeed. But they are hard to find. I have
some funding, but found it incredibly hard to hire / team up with someone good
enough. Most get lured into finance, which pays well but might not be the most
useful thing for humankind.

~~~
agumonkey
Polymath at the individual or company level (cross domain would be more
appropriate ? DNA Crystallography comes to mind)

I couldn't agree more with you about openness of advances in medicine, it
saddens me that too few people care about this. I wish I was in a position to
help in any way.

I'll keep your mail in mind too.

~~~
nextos
Both. Well, I think focussed individuals with 1 area of expertise are fine.
But you need someone who is at least a a very good computer scientist, has
some formal background in probability theory and ideally grasps genetics quite
well (which is far from trivial as it's a moving target).

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teslabox
I went to high school with Matt, and followed his son's blog -
[https://overcomingmovementdisorder.blogspot.com/](https://overcomingmovementdisorder.blogspot.com/)
\- regularly about six years ago, while they were trying to figure out what
was wrong.

One of the problems with the precision medicine initiative is that medicine
only loosely incorporates the actual findings of physiology. For example, old
people routinely get their steroid hormone systems kneecapped with statin
drugs. Various media reports in the last few years have revealed that there is
very little benefit to suppressing cholesterol levels (women receive no
benefit at all), but the drugging of old people continues.

~~~
teslabox
This comment was posted from my phone, and I think I should clarify two
things:

1\. Matt is one of two classmates that I remember from that high school. I
switched schools for the last two years, didn't integrate well, and was
recovering from an injury for half of my senior year. But Matt was friendly,
and loaned me a book about C++, which I eventually mailed back to him.

The other person was a neighbor. His name was Chris, and he had a nicely-
restored orange truck.

2\. The problem is not with "precision medicine", but with medicine itself.
The name of this project implies that they're going to turn medicine's hunting
rifle into a sniper rifle. But conventional medical practice has inherited a
bunch of assumptions that are basically wrong. Standard medicine's "rifle" is
just a crummy old shotgun that's lucky to hit anything.

If you get shot in the head, go to the trauma center - they do good work, and
can possibly save your life. If you have a chronic disease, get a dozen second
opinions, including from non-medical doctors. If you have a psychiatric
problem, avoid psychiatrists as if your life depends on it: conventional
psychiatry is a disaster-in-progress.

The precision medicine effort is an opportunity to clean Medicine's house. The
drug companies won't be happy when their businesses wither away, but maybe the
lawyers will help them go quietly into the night.

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qewrffewqwfqew
A little disappointing to see the links to his favourite paper going to
paywalls. Here are arxiv/free links:

39 page JFP version:

[http://arxiv.org/pdf/1107.3539v1.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1107.3539v1.pdf)

12 pager from ICFP:

[http://arxiv.org/pdf/1007.4446.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1007.4446.pdf)

8 page CACM highlight:

[http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/dvanhorn/pubs/vanhorn-might-
cacm...](http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/dvanhorn/pubs/vanhorn-might-cacm11.pdf)

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jmcdonald-ut
I got to take Matt's compilers course. He was a really exceptional professor
who had a way of presenting pretty mundane and rigorous material in an
interesting way. His lectures were always engaging. If your interested in
understanding programming languages at a lower level I can't recommend enough
perusing his blog.

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agumonkey
This has been posted twice already but only reached FP now. The laws of
timezone I guess. Anyway I'm happy it's visible.

