[iongoatb]

I'm curious who all these sarcastic bio "experts" are that are suggesting getting a PhD or hiring one. I'm a former bio major and researcher/scientist that transitioned to software engineering years ago. I've published papers in bio and worked with many PhDs. Many of them were idiots. Being a PhD doesn't mean anything, it's the independent work that you put in yourself (in an academic lab or by yourself) that determines how skilled you become.

If you have strong CS skills then you should:

1) Focus on bioinformatics. You will immediately be of use as far as making your own product/service or working for a startup if you apply your skills there. Most bio specialists are incredibly weak at data analysis and/or any type of computing. Pretty much all the important problems in bio are computational in nature. The "impressive" bio researchers/scientists have the data science skills of a sub-par / average data scientist / CS grad.

2) Create a home lab or find one / start one locally. Look up the odin project. Work on DIY genetic engineering and you can even take classes from that site. If you just get to this point and stop you will literally have more practical skill and knowledge than the vast majority of graduates with bio degrees.

3) Lots of biohackers experiment with themselves for clout/hype/attention. It never ends well. There are plenty of lab organisms that you can easily source and ethically experiment with.

4) Don't listen to anyone that tells you that you can't do something because you don't have a PhD. Those are the same type of people that missed out on the computing and internet revolutions because they were busy doing trivial academic work.

[dekhn]

Saying that many PhDs you worked with are idiots says more about you, than it does about the PhDs.

PhD process is only one path, but it has a number of useful attributes, such as being very close to the active state of the art research, feedback from experts in the field, handholding through the paper and grant process, and introduction to a large social network. Those are all very hard to do with home labs and biohacking. Things like journal clubs with other grad students often help people learn how to evaluate the literature with the appropriate context. Independent work is important, but teamwork and learning from others is far more important.

I've worked with some very smart people (famous software engineers with long track records of innovation) that wanted to help with bioinformatics, and they did do some cool things, but their lack of deep context (the sort of thing you can get from a PhD program or working in the field for many years) ultimately led to problems such as premature optimization for the wrong distribution of data.

Nonetheless, I have see independents who came to the field with no background, absorbed the ground knowledge, and made major contributions, but that's absurdly rare compared to PhDs.

[mindcrime]

Saying that most PhDs you worked with are idiots

The person you are replying to did not say that.

[goatlover]

But they did say "many of them are idiots", which is similar and rather arrogant. I don't trust people who claim their colleagues and classmates are idiots. Dunning-Kruger effect and hubris being what they are.

[mindcrime]

But they did say "many of them are idiots", which is similar

Similar, yes. But, at least to my mind, there's a pretty big jump from "many" to "most". But maybe that's just me. shrug

[xeromal]

Mot really, many still sounds like more than 50%. That's a huge claim

[blotter_paper]

Nope, we have a separate word for that: most.

[haolez]

If the performance of those PhDs were extremely subpar to the point of hindering the research altogether, what sentence would you use to describe this situation?

[dekhn]

I think that's what they said, slightly paraphrased: "I've published papers in bio and worked with many PhDs. Many of them were idiots"

I have no interest in arguing about the interpretation of that sentence.

[mindcrime]

I have no interest in arguing about the interpretation of that sentence.

Then don't "interpret" anything. The person who wrote that sentence explicitly said "many" and not "most". Barring some evidence to the contrary, the sensible thing to do is take it literally, no interpretation necessary.

[dekhn]

I changed the text from "most" to "many" to more closely match. This seems like a fairly pedantic thing to complain about, not really contributing to the substance of my argument.

[exp1orer]

Thanks! For others who tried to google "The Odin Project", the correct link is https://www.the-odin.com/ . It's confusing because that's also the name of a website for learning web development (https://www.theodinproject.com/).

[Odenwaelder]

1) Not enough for starting a biotech startup as OP would like to do. Having a PhD means that you've spent years on a certain subject. You cannot just read a book and be up to speed on biomedical research and CRISPR.

2) Having hands-on experience in wet labs is useful and relatively easy to learn. People can learn wet lab skills sufficient to carry out experiments (i.e. pipetting stuff together) in under a year. This is not what research is about though.

3) True

4) You don't need a PhD. But to truly succeed in biology, you need to learn things from the ground up, which takes years of studying. If you just read a few books, you will be able to understand certain parts of it, but as a founder of a biotech startup, you will be the equivalent of a tech startup founder blindly following buzzwords such as "blockchain".

[iongoatb]

Never recommended just "reading a book" - although books are for knowledge transfer. In fact, I recommended the exact opposite. Creating or joining a lab to do DIY genetic engineering is not pipetting. Anyone can easily obtain the materials to do CRISPR and implement various ideas they get from reading the latest research and literature. It is exactly analogous to the computer and internet revolution. All of those founders learned things from the ground up, often outside of academia, while others were completing academic research. The truth is that the same opportunity is now available to biotech and genetic engineering. The odin project, for example (I am not affiliated in any way whatsoever), offers all the materials to build your own home DIY bio engineering lab. That is certainly enough to do the required research and test / validate various research ideas, and ultimately creating a startup.

[fabian2k]

Just taking a quick look at the DIY stuff, that only seems to cover the initial genetics experiments. The equipment offered on the Odin project sites doesn't really cover what comes after that.

What do you do after you introduced a plasmid or modified the genome of some bacteria?

[iongoatb]

There are plenty of ways to get access to and use the advanced equipment that you may need for research after getting past the beginner and intermediate level. This comes to mind: https://www.biolabs.io/

[pkpkpk2]

RE: "Having a PhD means that you've spent years on a certain subject. You cannot just read a book and be up to speed on biomedical research and CRISPR."

Isn't that what books are for? To compile, document and share knowledge some people spent years to figure out?

[Odenwaelder]

There is a huge gap between having knowledge from books and being able to do original research, let alone solving a biomedical niche problem using CRISPR. This gap is usually filled with an advanced degree, where you spend years in the lab, keep track of the latest research in the field, try to find your niche and solve the actual problem.

I mean, by all means, try it. But life sciences are not computer science. The approach is entirely different and quality of the work you need to do is different. It looks much, much easier than it is. (Which is, on a different note, why I believe the whole pseudoscience crap such as anti-vaxxers is gaining so much traction)

[pvaldes]

> But life sciences are not computer science

Exact

1) The use of materials is totally different

Computer programming is a stuf that uses reciclable electricity and "eating your own dog food" kind programs, cheap to produce or free to copy, easily available and in many cases free except by the hardware (Hardware that can be hired, "clouded" or increased gradually).

You don't need to pay a dime for using R, C, Perl or Python and you can obtain the four, ready to use in your computer in less than a half hour. If you need a microscope, there is not an equivalent open source stuff replacement available.

In Biology the matherials will be sold to you only in packages of 10 Kg each pigment, with a caducity date, even when you would need to mix just 10 grams of each one. The spendable one-use only stuff is not free and the price for a single kit is incredible. You will pay it in any case because is indispensable for validating your work and you plan to use 500 of those kits the next year so you are a captive client from this company (that could decide to stop selling you if you try a way to lower the price, and will sue you if you try to copy the formula and make the product by yourself).

2) Documentation is not free and obtaining it is time consuming

In computer programming, you dont need to spent weeks to be delivered to you, or plan a travel to Peru to collect samples of a plant virus. You don't need to spend days just to reach the documentation navigating a miriad of closed or pay per viewed journals, at 50 dollars to peek in each paper.

You can expect to learn something and use it for years. Fortran is still there. You can program automatically your computer to make a hundred of safety copies each working day. In biology you can not clone your amazonian beetles collection, is unique and will be atacked and reduced to dust by real bugs from day one if you do not protect it.

3) There is not an obvious, linear path to success

Errors are random events that you can't always control

In biology you will lose eight months of your research because your samples travelling from Swedden to Madrid end somehow stuck in a Lithuanian airport for ten days and now are defrozen and unusable. You needed this research to assure the new funds and keep running, and now you have three months to obtain new samples, redo and fix it.

You can lose years chasing a dead end or be superseeded by a genius in some part of the planet that discovered the same as you first, or a different and better way to do it.

4) You don't just buy a lab and hire a team to create "something" nice.

Unless you are in the bussiness of teaching science you design the lab according of the exact product what you are trying to create. Any machine that you ordered and will not use enough frequently later is a hole in your presupuest. Any timed out kitt that you bought in excess quantity is your money ending in the dumpster bin.

You need to hire somebody familiar with what "hardware" is trendy and works and what machines are outdated since ten years even if you see it in each faculty and in propaganda.

[iongoatb]

Describing the current state of CS and comparing it to the current state of biotech/genetic engineering is like comparing apples to oranges. In the beginning of the computer revolution the obstacles were extremely similar to the current obstacles (or opportunities) with biotech. The materials were expensive, documentation wasn't abundant, people didn't think personal computers would ever be a thing or that people would interact on the internet using social networks, and server/computing costs were extremely capital intensive before cloud computing.

There is a great opportunity at this moment, similar to the opportunity that Bill Gates and Paul Allen had. Mainframe computers were expensive, yet they found ways to practice and become highly skilled. There wasn't documentation like there is now, yet hacking culture found ways to build cool and effective stuff. Obviously there wasn't a linear path to success - people thought personal computers would never be necessary, yet Apple and Microsoft were huge successes that no one ever expected. There are people that see opportunity in fields like biotech and bioengineering, and there are people that only see the obstacles. The former create amazing things, while years later the latter are envious that they didn't have similar vision and courage.

You made my point.

[pvaldes]

>There is a great opportunity at this moment

I wouldn't advice to invest in the company of this guy, but is their money, not mine, so... do as you please. Honestly, I would love to hear that he became billionaire.

[mindcrime]

You cannot just read a book and be up to speed on biomedical research and CRISPR.

FWIW, the OP didn't specifically say ze wanted to do "biomedical". Biotech is bigger than just medical applications. Biotech could skew more towards materials science, or environmental engineering, or any number of areas besides "treatment for diseases in humans" or whatever.

[aaavl2821]

Even better than a home lab is finding a friend who works in a research lab, and shadowing them while they do experiments.

Safety is an obvious benefit to this approach, but it also allows you get exposure to more interesting and complex experiments that are more cutting edge and comparable to the kinds of work you'd actually do at a company. These labs have access to equipment and reagents that you cant get anywhere else. From what Ive seen the at home stuff you can do is incredibly limited

This approach also gives you exposure to proper experimental design and technique, which is really hard to learn on your own because biology experiments take so long. Biology experiments take long enough even if you know how to do them

[el_cujo]

>I'm curious who all these sarcastic bio "experts" are that are suggesting getting a PhD or hiring one

>Don't listen to anyone that tells you that you can't do something because you don't have a PhD.

I definitely don't think getting a PhD automatically makes you some super genius. I've also worked with a fair number of grad students get their PhD that probably shouldn't have just because they'd been in their program long enough and basically got "pushed" out. That said, if OP is coming at the perspective of starting a business and presumably needing to convince investors/clients that he knows what he's doing, it's kind of silly to suggest he doesn't need any PhD's working for him.

Even if whatever job they're doing doesn't really require "PhD-level expertise", hiring a PhD is a fairly easy way to lend yourself some credibility, particularly towards non-technical people who probably put more weight on having a higher degree.

[aaavl2821]

I think for non scientists looking to work in biotech, it is critical to also understand how the industry works and how value is created. That's the failure point for most biotech startups -- they dont have a useful application of their tech, or the useful application takes costs too much to develop compared to the value it creates

A practical way to do this is to invest in biotech stocks. This will expose you to clinical data, the regulatory process, and how value is created and destroyed. Evaluating clinical data and unmet medical needs is the core skillset in evaluating market potential of a drug, device, diagnostic or patient-facing software

Having skin in the game will help you focus your learning. But only invest as much as you can afford to lose, treat it like tuition.

[unearthed]

> "That's the failure point for most biotech startups -- they dont have a useful application of their tech."

This is precisely the failure of every academic ever. We can examine this through the Theil-lens where they're trying to create a narrative of uniqueness where their research applies + revolutionizes everything ( when it does not ).

But everyone knows this is not the case. This is the central plague of all academic research, that its the pursuit of novel understanding before useful application.

I would argue that this is more a defining characteristic of the current academic pyramid scheme than biotech startups.

Biotech startups dont go out for VC unless they HAVE a market.

Biotech phds go to the NIH regardless of whether theres a market.

[tikej]

> This is the central plague of all academic research, that its the pursuit of novel understanding before useful application.

Plague of all academic research?! Isn't the point of academic research to understand before application (and quite often application is not the goal at all and that's ok)?

I get that it may seem trivial to apply something, but with high-cost risks of mistakes when they happen in biology/medicine it is not.

The pharma industry learned this the hard way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide

It seems to me that some software engineers/computer scientist think that other fields are slow/full stupid people because the progress is not fast. Well the progress is not fast because cost to start is often huge, wetware can't be moved to cloud, stakes are higher than unhappy customers etc.

[goatlover]

> This is the central plague of all academic research, that its the pursuit of novel understanding before useful application.

Uh, not all knowledge is about making products. I hope you meant "all academic research" only in context of biotech startups. And applied science is only part of the scientific endeavor, which is to understand the world, regardless of whether that can be monetized.

[unearthed]

Right. Im not claiming that it is.

However a trait which is more readily attributed to academic research ( not creating a profitable product ) is more applicable to academic research than to startups.

Per the Thiel quote (summarized):

The history of academic research is riddled with scientists making no profit.

[analog31]

In my view, at the very least, a person needs to find out whether they have any hope of functioning in a lab environment. Have you ever fixed a bicycle, or a toilet? I've worked with some really bright people from a variety of fields, and many of them would be downright dangerous to themselves and others if allowed into a lab.

Even if you end up managing a lab rather than working in one, you need to develop a sense for how a lab works and what it's like to do an experiment.

[bigmit37]

Thank your this. I am also very interested in biology and was looking to find a way to buy used equipment. I was reading biotech books and I was blown away by recombinant DNA and how insulin was invented as a medicine.

[pvaldes]

I was looking to find a way to buy used equipment

"I'm planning to participate in Olympic games against the best athletes of the planet. I plan to buy a few used sneakers of a similar size than my feet and a second hand tennis racket that is not too worned out. I plan to win against people with brand new and tailor-made equipment".

In short. Don't do it unless you know what you are buying. If you know what you are buying, don't do it if you can afford doing otherwise.

In most cases used equipment will be sold because either the lab had been crushed by better equipped competitors, or is obsolete.

[agumonkey]

> idiots

really idiots ? I'd be shocked if PhD were really lacking intelligence that much (even if you used the term as an hyperbole)