Thread by @RuxandraTeslo

I wrote an entire post abt this. Imo, that's not the issue. Modern biology was in large part invented by physicists/ physical chemists/ mathematicians. Crick was a physicist. All the early protein crystallographers were physical chemists.

writingruxandrabio.com/p/why-havent-b…

Yes, there was a time when protein structures weren't solvable with the latest software. Where you needed to know Maths etc. Elspeth Garman, distinguished professor of protein crystallography in the Oxford Biochem department when I was there was a physicist by training

Then came the human genome people. Richard Durbin.

Eric Lander - a mathematician by training and as influential a biologist one could dream of - former Science Advisor. He was the Head of the richest institute in Biology - The Broad.

The single cell stuff. Aviv Regev co head of the Human Cell Atlas. Also quantitative scientist by training.

So what if you know the structure of DNA? So what if if you know all the protein structures? So what if you have single cell RNAseq from all cells in a tissue? These things helped, but they didn't "solve biology"

Biology is always more complicated

Maybe AI will solve this all.

But my point is -- we always had great quantitative talent in bio. Would we benefit from more? For sure. Are our coding practices degenerate? Yes. Should we be using Python instead of R? Yes.

But my point is that this was not the bottleneck that stopped us from "solving biology". Ultimately, we do have good protein structures due to all the work of the physical chemists. We do have the genomes of countless species. We do have the epigenomics. We do have this and and this and this

It's weird to act as if modern molecular biology founders weren't at least 50% coming from other fields. At the very least. Physics Maths Chemistry. Did it solve disease ? Nope.

Now @nvidia is investing in Bio. And top AI scientists like @mmbronstein are involved in bio problems and bio start ups and so on. And I hope they solve it, finally. But I just wanna stress that Bio is and has always been the first domain ppl with quantitative training

@nvidia @mmbronstein Turn their attention to when they wanna do smth a bit different -- because they see it as meaningful. And yes, it would be good if we had even more of this talent. But no, I don't think this has been the bottleneck so far.

@nvidia @mmbronstein (And, again, maybe with AI this will change). But I see people doing AI for bio everywhere. So what's the issue then?