Oh wow - I saw this story a few weeks ago (absolutely horrifying) and ended up binging on caving incident stories. My takeaway was that regardless of how experienced the spelunkers are, something can go wrong.
In the midst of my binge, I also found this awesome(ly horrifying) Youtube Channel of cave explorers. They have explored some amazing caves, but here's a video of them in some really tight spaces to illustrate the risk these explorers take (warning, may induced some anxiety): https://youtu.be/Us-XA2BRLgg?si=Lb62ZE1IHG4MD6K3&t=677
I'm scared of heights but I'm attracted to rock climbing, so I climb anyway and just deal with it. Caves also have a certain attraction, but those stories terrify me far more than the prospect of a serious fall. The idea of dying trapped in a tight space underground makes dying on a rock climb sound downright comforting.
It is not only the fact that we are getting mentally lazy by having on demand access to all of human knowledge and opinion, but it is also that it takes the magic out of certain social interactions. For example, having a discussion with a friend over coffee, where both of you might be trying to remember the details of a specific topic. Previously, you might have spent 10-15 minutes digging into the topic, exercising each other's memory until you both arrived at the 'aha' moment where suddenly you remember the key detail/fact that you both were looking for. Anecdotally, when that happened, it was a deeply rewarding moment (dopamine hit, but you had to work for it!). With all of this knowledge at our fingertips, those moments are gone. I wonder if the lack of that mental 'sparring' and the ensuing reward that it brings is causing us to miss out on a key social/mental feedback loop that could not only allow you to exercise your mind, but also to get you used to moments of frustration and disagreement with another person (which is a useful skill to develop when you are contending with someone on a topic in which the answer is unknown).
Anyway, more relevant to the parent comment, we have faced this challenge before in the physical domain (i.e. our ability to move ourselves vs transportation technology). We have bikes, cars, trains, and planes (and now cybertrucks!), yet we still recognize the necessity for physical exercise (although Ozempic and other weight loss drugs may change this dynamic). Ultimately, with the introduction of technology that makes our lives easier (at least initially), the natural capabilities that we've developed over billions of years to serve those functions become vestigial if not used.
I imagine a good compromise might be a small piece of "contract work" where a company presents a small representative task as a project for a candidate to complete and the candidate actually gets some form of compensation for their time. There are definitely problems to this approach, but in a best case scenario, the result is a win-win situation even if a candidate doesn't get hired. At the moment every candidate that doesn't get hired represents a net loss for both parties (time for both and opportunity for the candidate)
If you are interested, I can connect you with a consultant in the field who works with VCs and young biotechs. Really great to work with and if he can't help you out, I am sure he knows someone who can help you.
Much of the information about existing drugs was organized, but within textbooks (Merck manual, etc).
It had never been systematically structured and organized online (but likely internally within pharma). The data was (is) manually curated, included off-targets and potentially new targets, along with a suite of deep chemistry features and spectra that linked small molecules to their targets. In addition it was really the first place to organize biologic drugs, with their sequences (largely extracted manually from patents).
DrugBank was all part of a larger goal, which was to decipher the human metabolome. However, it turned out to be more successful that than (http://www.hmdb.ca is the current version of the human metabolome database, something I was also intimately involved in).
In terms of how we make money, we sell access to additional manually curated datasets (with the help of a bunch of NLP stuff for initial extraction and for QA). These datasets are structured for ML applications and integration into pharma pipelines or medical software. Additionally we sell access to an API that provides advanced queries useful for drug discovery, repurposing, and generally looking up drug information in a more uniform way. We focus on developer happiness, good documentation, and speed. Even just getting a drug product list from various jurisdictions, and keeping it up to date, is a surprisingly hard problem that the API solves.
However, keeping the data open and available for academic / student research, as well as publishing and updating drugs through the website is something we love. It's been nice to find a balance where we can get out of the cycle of grant funding but still offer something to the community and general public.
In the midst of my binge, I also found this awesome(ly horrifying) Youtube Channel of cave explorers. They have explored some amazing caves, but here's a video of them in some really tight spaces to illustrate the risk these explorers take (warning, may induced some anxiety): https://youtu.be/Us-XA2BRLgg?si=Lb62ZE1IHG4MD6K3&t=677
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