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1106 points sama | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.288s | source
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etendue ◴[] No.12508615[source]
How would one go about meaningfully contributing to solving problems in genetics without having done the work leading to a MD or PhD (or both)?
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1. snowwrestler ◴[] No.12509458[source]
Genetic research uses computational techniques today. However, most academics who understand genetics well are crappy programmers. My source for this is a friend who is a tenure-track professor of evolutionary biology at a major university, with publications based on computational analyses of genomes. In pulling those publications together, he inevitably had to spend a lot of time time reviewing and cleaning up the terrible code of his co-authors, checking for correctness. "And I'm not even good at coding," he said. "That's how bad this stuff was!"

So, I think there must be a role for strong developers to partner with strong genetic researchers to make the best use of computers for research. That role might not exist now--you might have the opportunity to go create it. But it does seem sorely needed.