| ...as difficult as discovering new medicines, you mean? Chemistry and molecular biology are fiendishly complicated fields, far more complex and less predictable than what general (and most of the non-biochem STEM majors) imagine them to be. How do I know? I thought of one brilliant startup idea that would solve so many of the world's problems if only we used computers to simulate biological systems. Result: https://xkcd.com/1831/ Reference materials: https://www.amazon.ca/Molecular-Biology-Cell-Loose-Version/d... I strongly recommend to treat it as introductory-level text on the same level as "K&R - C Programming Language". Yes, all 1464 pages of it. https://www.amazon.ca/Fundamentals-Systems-Biology-Synthetic... On the same level as above text, but with more math. https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Computational-Chemistry-... That or any other book on computational chemistry will give you an understanding why it is difficult to design anything of value in biological systems. ML can only help so much. Also check out this page for entire field scope: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omics |
It's done in an interesting style, with lots of direct references to current literature. I was surprised to see a recent edition on IA: https://archive.org/details/alberts-molecular-biology-of-the...