alt Hacker NewsAside:
Hey, a lot of fellow biologists here! A few questions:
Is there a 'hacker news' for biology that I'm missing out on?
Where do you get your biology news from?
Where do you think the field/s are going?
Is bio harder than other STEMs?
I'm a neuroscientist/bioengineer by training and profession. I followed the path that a lot of commenters here did too, in that I came back to bio after a harder STEM career (physics). Glad to know I'm not alone in this!
Replies
Fun questions! My takes:
1) Sadly there isn't really. There are a few good blogs like Derek Lowe's "In the Pipeline" that centralize news, but no anonymous online forum like this.
2) Google scholar alerts, Twitter, Bluesky, and word of mouth.
3) I think our understanding of biological processes at the mesoscale is about to hit an inflection point, largely through advances in electron microscopy (cryo-ET) and the ability to perform simulations at this scale.
4) Not harder but definitely more messy and progress is less linear.
I have a PhD in cell biology, as well as post-doctoral research experience. I'm now a software engineer for a big chip designer.
> Is there a 'hacker news' for biology that I'm missing out on?
Not that I know of. Could be cool. I produced a prototype platform that was a searchable DB of all papers published on PubMed, with a comment and karma system. The idea was to incentivise continued debate on published papers. Currently discredited papers continue to get cited for many years, because almost no-one publishes their critiques once the paper is published.
> Where do you get your biology news from?
Back in the lab, we would mostly just closely follow our small field with automated searches of PubMed. We'd find out about wider stuff by attending talks and speaking to other scientists. Often new and exciting things will take years to publish, so you would often find out before publication via talks.
> Is bio harder than other STEMs?
Only because the traditional high-school and university education in biology does not prepare people for the realities of cutting-edge bio research. I did a load of coding, image analysis, complex microscopy, chemistry etc etc, during my PhD and post-doc, none of which was taught during my degree or high school.
To thrive in biology research, you have to be comfortable not knowing about a thing, but figuring out how to do the thing, which likely no-one has done before.