
We need more computer scientists in biology and biomedical research - Protostome
https://medium.com/@LiorZ/we-need-more-computer-scientists-in-biology-and-biomedical-research-af41fda2ae44
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maxander
> Computer scientists should be involved in the R&D process from its very
> beginning, not just as sophisticated data analysts. Starting from the design
> of the wet-lab experiments — where the data is being generated. This is
> because we, as computer scientists understand that data is the most
> important resource. Your model, whether it is an incredibly sophisticated
> CGAN or a logistic regression is as good as your data.

This is the key point in the article. There's lots of bioinformatics and
computational biology work being done, but the vast majority of it winds up
being of questionable use- either because the researcher didn't understand the
biological system well enough to make an appropriate model, or because the
biologists at the bench didn't understand the analytical problems well enough
to collect the right kind of data.

The typical model of research is "design experiment -> collect data -> analyze
data -> results", and when each step is being done by different people, with
different training and no input into each other's work, it's _tremendously_
wasteful. It's the science equivalent of the waterfall method, except that
instead of technical debt you wind up with dubious publications.

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bufferoverflow
Who is this "we"? When I graduated with a degree in bioinformatics, the offers
I got were ridiculous, the best one was $54K near NYC. And I was already a
published scientist with years of programming experience at the time. At the
same time salaries for web dev were great, so I stayed in web dev.

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iso1337
Yeah, that and the incentives are not there for programmers. They are often
treated as the support, not given proper training and managed by people who
has no idea how to develop software. This is slowly changing but is still bad.

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arandr0x
This was the career I wanted, but I'm not willing to work in academia. I
actually have a biochem degree and 10 years of work experience as a software
engineer. The point should be rephrased : "We need cheap programmers in
biology and biomedical research in San Diego and Boston to blindly obey senior
cancer researchers with fat pockets, and we can't afford the market rate for a
good programmer or data scientist in those two arguably very pricey locales,
and we don't want to hire remote workers, even though the job is desk-based.
Ideally they should be willing to be graduate students, that's easier on the
budget."

