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by natechols 1968 days ago
I think what bugs me the most is the common assumption that we just need better modeling tools to make a lot of the messy lab work go away. Everyone who raises this idea seems to think it's original and revolutionary and a no-brainer, but there's at least 40 years of bitter experience in biotech and pharma development saying otherwise. Even genuinely impressive feats like AlphaFold get inflated wildly in importance (and used to retroactively bash experimentalists for all the time they wasted by not listening to software people). Actually speeding up the entire process of biomedical research requires improvements across the board in many different fields, and it's not something that is magically going to be solved by computer science wizardry alone.