Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by sinab 1837 days ago
I read this essay with interest as I work at the intersection of biology and engineering; I was disappointed. The essay fails to identify low-hanging fruit in automating biology and fails to explain how their company (Transistor Bio) is "picking" those low-hanging fruit. In retrospect it reads more like a poorly argued marketing pitch than an exposition on interesting and achievable problems in biology automation.

The company's website also leaves much to be desired; though they have reinvented the liquid handling robot [1].

[1] https://publish.obsidian.md/serve?url=transistor.bio/busines...
2 comments
dsign 1837 days ago
As with all such ventures, the chances of success are, I daresay, one in one hundred, or even lower. But since I would very much like to see at least 10 of those ventures succeed in my lifetime, because as the author said, "Assuming it is true that you want to live longer, healthier lives — a position not shared by the dull and dreary", I think we must do everything we can to have thousands of these startups all over the world. Even if all we can do is give them moral support.

We have thrown far more money to adware-crap-companies of what we have thrown to systems biology startups, even if only the later can have a meaningful impact on human health.

link
cinntaile 1837 days ago
A good start would be to actually mention the low hanging fruit in an article titled that. This is a bad ad and it doesn't leave me with a good impression of the company.
link
inciampati 1837 days ago
I unfortunately came away with the same impression. I was hoping for an integrative perspective on changes that do make a big difference in everyday biology, such as open source systems for critical parts of the research process (e.g. https://www.opentrons.com/).

From the informatics side, bio ~ computer science. Major advances in data structures are driven by the absurdly data-heavy problems in biology. But when you get into the wet, things are messy and there is not a culture of automation. If lab automation can go fully open source, then we have the chance to see the same transition on the wet side of things.

link