| Think of the flip side: Programmers are terrible biologists. Sure, it would be great if we all had more time to learn how to code. Coding is important. But I'd say the onus should be on coders to build better tools and documentation so they are empowering people to do something other than code, rather than reduce everything to a coding exercise because making everything look like code means less boring documentation and UX work for coders. I mean, biology is in fact a full on degree program and you pretty much need a PhD before you're defining an original research topic. It's not because biologists are dumber and learn slower. It's that biology is complicated and poorly understood, and it takes years to learn. Contrast this to coding... you don't even need to go to college to launch a successful software product, and the average person can became proficient after a few years of dedicated study. However, this is a few years that biologists don't have, as their PhDs are already some of the longest time-wise to finish. The decision to rename genomes is totally consistent with the biologists MO: if a cell won't grow in a given set of conditions, change the conditions. Sure we can CRISPR edit the genes to modify a cell to to grow in a set of conditions, but if it's usually far easier to just change the temperature or growth media than to edit a cell's DNA. My take away is that this is more a failure of programmers and/or a failure of their managers to guide the programmers to make tools for biologists, than of biologists to learn programming. Sure, coders get paid more, but they aren't going to cure cancer or make a vaccine for covid-19 without a biologist somewhere in the equation. And I'm glad the biologists developing vaccines today are doing biology, and not held up in their degree programs learning how to code! |