[hnmm23]

i asked this elsehwere in the thread, and if you scroll lower you'll see why i want to learn but this is going to sound like a bit of a ramble as im tired and feeling passionate and emotional right now but bear with me...

..if i want to learn more bio not bc i want to hack or edit genes or whatever but because of reasons such as:

understanding autoimmune diseases, the treatments for them, relationship to other issues, medication and their mechanism of actions, and just a whole host of other stuff

basically i want to learn how to help people i know who suffer from multiple autoimmune diseases and the mental health/daily life and fertility struggles associated with them,

where should i go?

thank you!

[joshuamcginnis]

Go to scholar.google.com, search "autoimmune disease treatment", filter by last five years, use sci-hub to read the paper. Repeat until you learn enough to find your next step forward.

[veddox]

Absolutely not. You probably won't understand 10% of what you read. Better: go to your local university library, check out a good medicine/biology textbooks, and read that. Then go read the papers.

[Balgair]

Per the article, a deep dive is likely better than a general overview. Also, OP says to repeat until it clicks, which is generally correct.

But the real issue still stands: Bio is hyper complex and it takes a long time to get used to the nomenclature and ideas.

[veddox]

> But the real issue still stands: Bio is hyper complex and it takes a long time to get used to the nomenclature and ideas.

That is exactly the point, which I believe the article author either glossed over or didn't fully appreciate.

I have a B.Sc. in general biology and am about to get my M.Sc. in ecology. I do scientific work at a university and read (ecological) research papers every day. Out of curiosity, I just followed joshuamcginnis' advice and did the Google Scholar search.

I failed to understand the first three items that came up.

The basic principles of biology are usually not actually that complicated, at least when you compare them to particle physics or compiler design or stuff like that. But biology is still hugely, hugely complex, because you simply have so many interacting parts - and yes, you only really understand it when you know about an appreciable fraction of those parts.

That is why they spent the first 1.5 years of our degree simply drilling knowledge into us as fast as we could absorb it. Because it's only once you have a broad overview of how everything works, that you can start to grasp (and reason about) how anything works in detail.

Biology is fascinating. There are millions of cool things to learn and yes, most teachers could probably do a much better job of teaching it. But if you really want to understand it, you just have to put in the effort.

[hnmm23]

i mean i want to learn about everything before that too, like history, links, diagnoses - to be sure, as well as testing/tracking metrics and the likes,

also reading is the easy part, but what about understanding? when im running into medical terms/and other things im not familiar with or equipped to understand, where do you go? bc i find myself ending down different rabbit holes and my productivty diminishes and my thinking gets scattered

i hope im making sense :)

[jplatzek]

Biologist here. I would start with a textbook called Janeways Immunobiology. It is the textbook that all of us have used to learn immunology and should be accessible for anyone with a high-school understanding of biology. The book already has many explanations of autoimmune diseases, so it should be everything you need.

[ashtonbaker]

Seconding this. I would also add that Biochemistry was really the class that first gave me the "I should have loved biology" feeling, so whatever the equivalent Biochem textbook is might be interesting as well.

[SturgeonsLaw]

University textbooks. They are written with the goal of building that foundational knowledge.

Scientific papers are great, but they assume a lot of pre-existing knowledge, whereas a textbook is designed to expose you to the concepts without any prior assumptions.

[joshuamcginnis]

It can take me weeks if not months to fully comprehend a new paper. One paper will require that I look up a lot of new terms, watch a lot of videos explaining the terms and repeating the process for the cited references. It sounds like you need more structure so I would suggest you take notes, set goals, organize your materials and schedule time for focusing on particular topics, tasks or techniques.

[hnmm23]

It’s hard to do that when I’m entirely new. Idk where to start or what raw knowledge I possess that combined with biology would achieve the results I want.

I know the end goal though, I want there to be an option, a fix or a painless way to manage autoimmune diseases, things like hormone and metabolic response imbalances -thyroid, androgen, progesterone, insulin - etc they all share a link to deadly lifelong debilitating diseases That make living hell for so many people and I want to take that away for them or at least generations down the line.

I know I’m a rambling scattered mess right now I thank you for being patient

[_8ljf]

Be aware that on the scale of complexity, the immune system is at the deep end of the pool. Your motives may be admirable, but the chances of you jumping straight in and emerging with the Olympic gold medal are good as zero.

If you want to get into the science of it then I’d suggest you start with general courses in biochem and physiology at the undergrad level and build your way up from there†. Expect to invest a good hard 10-20 years of your life getting up to speed, with no hard guarantees of success at the end of it.

Or, if you just want to help people right now, go get yourself involved in charitable fundraising for an organization that’s already working the problem. Still no guarantees, but at least they’ve got a big head start. Just don’t end up on a list like this, ’kay:

https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/?s=immune+scam

--

† Courses I flunked myself, BTW, but at least I learned just how much I don’t know—an insight I’ve subsequently found both invaluable and frighteningly scarce in tech.

[shock]

http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html

[jiggunjer]

Add the word "review" to your search queries. Often, single author articles just review history and current state of the art.

[bboygravity]

I'm an electronics/embedded programming guy and I "accidentally" learned biology by listening to a great bunch of podcasts while going to sleep and commuting.

At first you won't get all the terminology, but if you keep listening you'll eventually get it (that's how it worked for me).

The cool thing is that you'll dive right into the state of the art of academic research by the very people who do the research and write the papers. It's geared towards people like you and me: the curious general public.

Since you mentioned autoimmune diseases and medication, I recommend starting with: https://www.microbe.tv/immune/ If you have any particular disease you're interested in I would just do a search on that page and dive right in.

They also have weekly (almost daily now) updates on SARS-CoV2 where they seem to be ahead of the MSM by weeks to months: https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-683/

They talk with not just virologists and immunologists, but also people in industry who develop vaccines/meds, people who organize clinical trials and PEOPLE LIVE FROM SPACE: https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-682/

[Balgair]

> At first you won't get all the terminology, but if you keep listening you'll eventually get it (that's how it worked for me).

It's kinda like a cooking show. At first, you have no idea what they are doing, but after season three you just know that they don't have enough time to do a proper raspberry vinaigrette before the gong strike.

[kingjacob]

A good place to start would be to see if there's anything on NCBI Bookshelf, and then search pubmed for recent review articles. And then you can drill down further using their citations.

[ros86]

What about some MOOCS? There are plenty that will introduce you to this area.

[choutos]

Can you (or anyone) recommend a good one? Thank you!

[Melting_Harps]

> Can you (or anyone) recommend a good one? Thank you!

https://www.coursera.org/learn/biology-everywhere-foundation...

I recommend this as an entry level course series, I actually attended Dr. Peffer's lectures on campus (as a non student) after nearly 10 years after completing my BSc in Cellular and Molecular biology. She holds a post Doc and research position on Campus and really likes Ed-tech and the 'gamification' of Education as a whole; she is what I wished I had when I was doing my undergrad.

When you want to get really into, head over to Josiah Zayner's, The Odin [0], where he takes Bio-hacker methods to Gene Editing and synthetic Biology. He sells kits and has weekly podcasts [1] of his experiments and observations for people to follow along. They did a COVID vaccine trial on themselves, and then moved on to making lab-grown meat, which was actually very cool way to get into the space and the community.

0: https://www.the-odin.com/?

1: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-aCKd4djOAf_0BzyUMJ5FA