finally, someone with their head seemingly screwed on straight and willing to talk about it in public.
while i’m not intimately familiar with her work, i agree with her underlying philosophy: biology is weird and noisy and a hard but valuable row to hoe.
>biology is weird and noisy and a hard but valuable row to hoe.
I think this is definitely the general feeling among genomicists. We've all learned hard lessons about the difficulty of finding the ground truth.
A running gag among my colleagues and I are pointing out the seemingly endless stream of CS people who claim that "biology is just software" and how they want to use "machine-learning" or "big-data" to "disrupt" medicine. While I'm sure the their heart is in the right place, move fast and break things doesn't really work well when your subject is living beings.
Most genomicists don't care how the system works under the hood. They've already abstracted things to the level of base pairs and working with statistics. This
Biophysicists are the people who care about the underlying physical mechanisms of those systems.
The thing to understand is Barb was cross-trained- she worked in a deep statistics group (Jordan) but was embedded in a bio lab, and picked up all the necessary knowledge to understand the biological context. Most CS and stats people don't do that- they move up the chain to the convenient level of abstraction, and ignore the details below.
while i’m not intimately familiar with her work, i agree with her underlying philosophy: biology is weird and noisy and a hard but valuable row to hoe.