I totally agree with this! I wish we could "play with nature's design" like we can program computers. But alas, our technology is woefully inadequate for the task, and our understanding of the natural world is still sadly primitive. What is needed is a generation of people willing to commit themselves to basic science research.
Working in basic science is perhaps not as glamorous as working as an entrepreneur, a programmer, or whatever else. But over the course of a lifetime, the work is infinitely more satisfying.
Curious what field and capacity you're working in basic science. I'm considering pivoting out of industry. Studied physics undergrad but quite frankly couldn't cut it to do so post-grad. However I do wonder if another field would be doable for me... but without prereqs I'm not sure how to get onto that path now (I'm not a coder, getting really into bio/chem/neuro/genetics). Been out of uni 6 yrs
You can go into biology with no background. I went from physics and math as an undergrad to a PhD in biology. The first six months were rough, but if you really cut yourself off from your previous field and make yourself understand how the thought process in biology works, you can pick it up fairly quickly. Actually, I suspect that an undergraduate degree in biology might be a liability, since you will have memorized so many things that were simplifications or just outright false.
On the other hand, know that the field is incredibly political and that the old joke about the average IQ of both physics and biology going up when Delbruck switched from the former to the latter is true.
Well great to hear you've made a similar transition, and very cool to think that some of the bias coming from traditional lower-level bio training could be looked at as a liability.
I wonder if I can somehow find a way to pivot into bio without going through a university. Would love to somehow get there through industry, perhaps through some of the genome sequencing outfits which have some crossover with the semiconductor industry.
Hadn't heard the Delbruck joke but hah good to hear, if I understand you correctly, that in a sense it'd be easier to swim in bio if I was sinking in physics.
"our understanding of the natural world is still sadly primitive" You are talking for yourself ? For humanity ? For scientists you never met ? I honestly don't know who you are and how well suited are you (you're a specialist in bioengineering ?) to tell us how much "we" know or we don't. I'm just a software engineer with some basic understanding of genetic engineering, but my wife is a genetic technician in a lab, and it's amazing what operations they performed on a daily basis as part of their university classes and recently in research projects in real labs (and this didn't start yesterday or only with my wife's generation). So I'm very tempted to believe that you just woke up speaking about some limitations you don't personally know and it's not even in your area of expertise. This does not mean that today "everything" is possible or that we achieved the grand mastery of DNA. It's just that for the "right people" the understanding of the natural world is more advanced than you have ever dreamed (unless you are one of the "right people").
Computation chemistry has been going on for decades. Attempts at modeling how molecules behave is still quite primitive. We're talking about modelling the behavior of a object that is comprised of a few dozen atoms. That's it, pretty simple right? We'll the models aren't that good at predicting molecular behavior.
Let's move up a step now. Computation chemistry is used heavily by the drug industry. Get an x-ray structure of a protein (maybe a few hundred to a few thousand atoms) and see if it binds to a drug. Wow, now it's getting complicated. How successful is it? Not very. I can remember a computational chemist saying "oh hey, the model say if you replace X with Y, you'll increase binding by 10x". So we try and guess what? The binding was worse.
Now we move up to a biological system. Now we have hundreds (if not thousands) of proteins floating in a matrix of water and ions. We have a DNA strands of millions of base pairs, of which maybe 10% we actually know what they do. We also have small signalling molecules that do something we understand, but probably also do 10 other things we have no idea about.
It is very impressive how far biological "design" (genomics) has come so far, but right now the tools are incredibly blunt and the analysis is incredibly crude. I have no doubt our understanding will improve immensely over the coming decades, but I would guess we understand less than 1% of what's going on inside of complex living organisms.
You see, my feeling is that trying to guess the progress of genetics by extrapolating the complexity and insecurity of the computation chemistry is wrong. As far as I understood, genetics today is a lot about (but not only) identifying which genes (portions of DNA) are responsible of which phenotype (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenotype).Therefore a lot of resources are and were allocated to create a dictionary with genes as keys and phenotype as values. This dictionary is being populated at a quite fast pace and this combined with the possibility to take genes from some organisms and implant them in the DNA of a cell of other organisms and see the resulting phenotype is already a great achievement (imagine undergrads cutting and pasting DNA daily). They are not inventing new proteins and worry that they will not "bind" enough. They just take the DNA known to produce proteins in some organisms and place it in other organisms and suddenly proteins which have a known effect in different organisms, appear in a new organism. Yes, there is a long way from here to engineering genes that will produce and deliver a medicine inside an organism but I wouldn't call this primitive at all. Sorry for the simplification and possible errors.
OK, I see your perspective now. I agree that our understanding of how genes encode for proteins is well developed, as are our techniques for "transplanting" a gene from one organism to another.
What we have very little handle on is gene regulation. All those "non-coding" genes that scientists used to think were junk? They are actually used to control gene transcription.
Controlling this is infinitely easier in a simple organism like a hookworm, but the complexities of in human borders on obscene.
Working in basic science is perhaps not as glamorous as working as an entrepreneur, a programmer, or whatever else. But over the course of a lifetime, the work is infinitely more satisfying.