LetThereBeLight's comments

I think it is a shame that the 50+1 rule (which states that at least 50% of the team's voting rights must be held by club members) is only instituted in the German League. I don't think any fans actually want this super league to happen.

The current publication system is very odd. Mostly government money is being used to fund research, then professors are asked to review a manuscript (who may just hand it off to a grad student or postdoc) without any compensation for their time, and the final result then locked behind a paywall of some private journal.

It seems that the incentive of a journal is to maintain an appearance of legitimacy, rather than actually enforcing it. This is why, as the article mentions, journals tend to be fairly quiet about retractions and issues of misconduct.

There is a better incentive by those that are funding the research (the taxpayers/government) that their investments are resulting in legitimate works. This also goes in line with the idea that these final manuscripts should be freely available to the public. Now with that said, I also acknowledge that the idea of having the NIH, NSF. etc. operate the editorial and review process would be nightmarish.

Let's not forget that all the grain those cattle are eating were grown in nitrogen fixed soil produced via fossil fuels. Nor that roughly 40% of the world's crops are used to feed cattle. Or the other detrimental environmental effects to the land such as feedlot runoff that pollute streams and rivers. The environmental impact of raising cattle is by no means something we should ignore.

This is still subject to Landauer's principle, at best it will cost kT ln2 energy per bit erased.

That is interesting, I have had the exact opposite experience. People saying that genes and their regulatory circuits are all that matter and that proteins are boring byproducts of that. I guess it is a matter of what sub-community you find yourself in.

To anyone interested in early space flight and the Apollo missions, I strongly recommend reading Michael Collins's memoir Carrying the Fire. It is quite amazing all the training that the astronauts had to go through so they could manually perform various tasks and measurements, since the computing capacity was extremely limited.

Indeed, if you look at startup fellowships for scientists that currently exist, fellows don't have to give up IP or equity. Calling this program a fellowship in this context is highly misleading.

I use Libro.fm and am happy that at least some of my money ( 15%) is going to my local book store.

>If physicists adopt this humble mindset, and resist their craving for certitude, they are more likely to seek and hence to find more even more effective theories, perhaps ones that work even better than quantum mechanics.

I don't believe that most modern physicists dispute that the equations we use are anything more than models. For example, you won't go to a seminar on microrheology and have a physicists point out in disgust that the presented derivation is "wrong" because it used Newton's second law without the relativistic component. While this is perhaps an extreme example, it is the case that we often have to ignore certain effects/make certain assumptions to make equations solvable and interpretable. If we believed that our physics equations represented some "absolute truth," then we would never allow ourselves to make these sort of assumptions in the formulas we derive.

The technology for synthesizing large quantities of specific RNA sequences has only been available recently. Same goes for forming the lipid nanoparticles that are used for encapsulating and delivering the mRNA. In fact if anyone has more detailed information on how these two processes are done I would love to learn more.

What the author appears to be describing is the experience of being a PhD student/postdoc that he misses. As faculty you are (usually) no longer running experiments and analyzing data, but managing people/projects, writing/reviewing papers, teaching, sitting on committees, and constantly applying for grants. While it is indeed unlikely he can find a faculty position after 7 years of being out of academia, he may in fact be happier looking for a senior scientist position at a university. As long as he is okay with the salary that is.

>Being skeptical of the conventional wisdom can be useful, but keeping yourself intentionally ignorant of it is generally a bad plan.

Yes, I agree with this. It follows along the lines of the saying: You must learn the rules before you can break them. With that said, I have seen many 1st year graduate students spend weeks/months going through the literature only to come up with project ideas that are close derivatives of published works. This usually happens because a student put too much focus on absorbing the "conventional wisdom" of the field rather than starting with a question and seeing what research has already been done to address it.

However, there are plenty of scientists who disagree with this sentiment. I had a colleague who would quote Feynman, "I never pay any attention to anything by experts. I calculate everything myself." Maybe that works if you are Feynman, but I seem to recall John Preskill saying that he didn't think this mentality served Feynman well, at least in his later years.

Indeed. In fact there are several works directly showing the formation of protein phase separation occurring at the inner membrane surface to cluster receptors [1,2].

[1] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/363/6431/1093 [2] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/352/6285/595

Doing biology, as in culturing cells and performing biochemical assays does not come cheap. Software and wetware development are totally different ball games in terms of upfront costs and risk levels. Just building a wetware proof of concept without university resources is non-trivial in terms of the resources it requires. I don't think biology fits at all in the standard startup model.

I am one of the 39 PhDs mentioned in this announcement. Very unexpected to see this on HN.