[jr3592]

Yes, the biomedical world needs to go through the same boom that tech went through in the last 20 years.

The problem is accessibility. Tech grew largely because of how accessible the technology is. Biomedical research is still very difficult to get into, and as a result seriously curtails the potential progress we as a society could make.

I don't know what the solution is but there's got to be an easier way to tinker, test, explore, and play around with biomedical things (cells, viruses, etc.).

Ideally it would be a purely software world where we replicate everything down to the DNA level so that you can test and play around with potential solutions...

[bonsai_spool]

> Yes, the biomedical world needs to go through the same boom that tech went through in the last 20 years.

Why do you think that isn’t happening? So many comments here make broad claims about fields where the poster isn’t familiar. Being a programmer does not make one knowledgeable about other specialized fields

[clark_dent]

Biomedical research in the US has taken an absolute nose-dive several times over the past decade or two. This was my field for the past 20 years, so I'm fairly familiar.

It requires enormous capital investment and a very, very long time to turn out meaningful results, so it's only available to those with corporate-depth pockets or government subsidies. It also requires a broad and deep skill set.

With the FDA, USDA, NIH, CDC and DoEd all being gutted, the subsidies are gone. Academia can no longer support a huge swath of biomedical research.

[bonsai_spool]

> US has taken an absolute nose-dive several times over the past decade or two

This is also my field... and if the nose-dive is what has delivered in these past two decades RNA-seq, induced pluripotent stem cell generation, CRISPR-mediated genome therapies, CAR-T therapy, single-cell RNA and DNA profiling, spatial transcriptomics, targeted GLP- and incretin-modulation therapies? Then that's a wonderful nosedive.

The capital investment has always been true if you want to do R1 research. But you don't have to do that at all! There's also Oxford Nanopore, tons of open data through NCBI and other resources, more open papers than ever.

> It also requires a broad and deep skill set.

Yes. Like anything, being good takes time.

> Academia can no longer support a huge swath of biomedical research.

Maybe. I think there will be money for things that affect the rich (incurable cancer, longevity) and for things that are sexy to the unsophisticated (CZI Biohub 'OpenCell'). But there is money in this, so I don't think academia (to wit, people who know how to do research) will go away, just will change.

[sodafountan]

I agree that being a programmer doesn't make you an expert at everything, but OP brought up a good point. Tech is a lot more accessible than other fields. It would be nice if I could pivot into other fields as easily as someone could pivot into tech.

Aside from going to college for many years, there's really no other way to break into the medical field. College is expensive and quite daunting to many (myself included), which is a shame because I'd really like to contribute more to humanity than moving pixels around on a screen and helping businesses with their data problems.

[bonsai_spool]

The reason you can ‘pivot’ into tech is because you’re able to run programs and see their output on your own device.

You can do some data-oriented research at home, though you’d also have a lot of reading to do first.

Medicine requires seeing patients and their ailments and their recovery - not something we’ll ever be able to simulate well (for many reasons).

You can get a good medical education all online, but nobody will accept you’re not having seen patients

[JRandomHacker42]

> Being a programmer does not make one knowledgeable about other specialized fields

If I could make every HN user read this before commenting on literally any article...

[pibaker]

> Yes, the biomedical world needs to go through the same boom that tech went through in the last 20 years

We are going through one right now, just not so visibly. Many forms of cancer that would have killed you quickly at the turn of the century are now controllable, if not treatable. Coming up with a safe and working vaccine for a novel virus just a year after it emerges would be unthinkable 20 years ago. HIV went from a nasty death sentence to something you take one pill a day to keep control of within my lifetime.

We just don't like to talk about it because we don't like to talk about death and life stuffs.

What is funny about this accessibility and regulation point of view is I remember around 2021 and 2022 there is a hive mind of tech people who were paranoid about all the novel virus research, "gain of function" shit and want to preemptively ban it all. The same people who decry any regulation imposed on tech. Go figure.

[Ar-Curunir]

The human body is much more complex than any software system devised to this date.

We don’t have good ways to even start thinking about such simulations.

[giantg2]

"the biomedical world needs to go through the same boom that tech went through in the last 20 years."

Not going to happen with all the regulation. Plus, I think half of us techies got into it for games and boobs (bypass parental controls). Not a lot of that same adolescent motivation in that field.

[fragmede]

Yeah, but the culture surrounding computers now isn't the same as when whenever you grew up. The last few decades of tech didn't have ChatGPT to contend with. These days, going into medicine looks a lot more future proof than getting a CS degree.

[p00dles]

A big reason is clinical trials. They take time, they are expensive, and there isn’t another good way to determine an intervention’s safety and effectiveness.

[fragmede]

Man's best friend is the best friend to experiment on (instead of humans). Working mRNA cancer vaccine.

https://people.com/tech-pro-uses-chatgpt-to-create-cancer-va...

[everyone]

What's happened in software / computing in the last 20 years that's good? Imo it could be argued that overall the user experience has gotten worse. Dead internet theory, enshittification.

* The web is pretty much dead. Time Berners Lee's ideals certainly are.

* Computing is dominated by completely evil megacorps.

* They are making a concerted effort to make people as tech-illiterate as possible and also make universal computing illegal.

* Theres been years where GPU's were being price gouged, 1st by crypto bros, then NFT bros, now LLM bros.

* Cant even buy RAM now.

* They put e-fuses into hardware now, comes right out of the factory as ready made e-waste that cant be repurposed.

* The biggest platforms, Android and iOS, are walled garden, locked down, corporate nightmare worlds. And there is practically no alternative.

* Social media is making people depressed and also very easy to manipulate en-masse by anyone willing to pay.

* Moore's law stopped and software bloat overtook performance gains.

* VR might have been cool but it was pre-enshittified in its nascent stages. Freakin' facebook bought Oculus before they had released a single headset.

[natebc]

There's a lot of bleak things for sure.

Linux has come a long way Valve's efforts with Proton/Linux Gaming

[everyone]

Yeah that is good, there are some good things, but I think on average the computer user experience is worse.. In the 80's and 90's with the rise of microcomputers and the net and the web and Linux, things were so utopian, things just seemed to keep getting cooler and computing was empowering people.

That was the cool part of "the cycle". We are defo in the shit part now. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8201080-the-master-switc...