What he's saying applies to research nowadays too, especially biology-related. People in e.g. my lab (neuroscience) come from EE, Bio, Physics, Medicine, Stats, CS ...
It's working, though. Care is getting better than ever. Science is progressing faster than ever. We just need more. More funding, more education, more scientists, more talent. Especially in biology, we need a lot more computer scientists, especially the theoretical kind. A probabilistic pi-calculus would do wonders for dealing with the sorts of errors that cost Duane Smith his digits. We need more mathematicians to help us handle systems of vast and irreducible complexity, and we need more truly excellent experimentalists to pull off what was thought impossible.
That's what will help medicine the most, I think. More and better science, and intelligent people thinking rigorously about process. It costs money. My "one wish" would be to redirect the resources we've wasted in our War on Drugs, and the War on Terrorism / the Middle-East, and throw it all at the War on Human Ignorance. In truth, it's amazing how cheap progress is. The cost of developing a new cancer drug is way less than the cost of invading Iraq. It's actually cheaper to save lives rather than kill people!
This post doesn't really have a point. I just wanted to express my vote of total optimism for science in these days of rampant pessimism. It works, it's actually pretty cheap, and it gives back a thousand times more than what we put in. If you're in college and you're reading this, please become a scientist (or a doctor) :)
I fully agree with you here, I work in your field currently and noticed the wide range of skills that are employed. For example my lab director is a Physicist working in brain imaging research.
All the math I learned in school (I have a BS in math) seemed so small compared to the stuff I see used in the research the folks in my lab are doing. There is a great need of skilled mathematicians and comp sci folks in these bio based fields, as you pointed out. Biologist are smart people but when it comes to comp sci their cs skill sets are not always large enough for their need. That's where p eople like us fill in the blanks.
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What he's saying applies to research nowadays too, especially biology-related. People in e.g. my lab (neuroscience) come from EE, Bio, Physics, Medicine, Stats, CS ...
It's working, though. Care is getting better than ever. Science is progressing faster than ever. We just need more. More funding, more education, more scientists, more talent. Especially in biology, we need a lot more computer scientists, especially the theoretical kind. A probabilistic pi-calculus would do wonders for dealing with the sorts of errors that cost Duane Smith his digits. We need more mathematicians to help us handle systems of vast and irreducible complexity, and we need more truly excellent experimentalists to pull off what was thought impossible.
That's what will help medicine the most, I think. More and better science, and intelligent people thinking rigorously about process. It costs money. My "one wish" would be to redirect the resources we've wasted in our War on Drugs, and the War on Terrorism / the Middle-East, and throw it all at the War on Human Ignorance. In truth, it's amazing how cheap progress is. The cost of developing a new cancer drug is way less than the cost of invading Iraq. It's actually cheaper to save lives rather than kill people!
This post doesn't really have a point. I just wanted to express my vote of total optimism for science in these days of rampant pessimism. It works, it's actually pretty cheap, and it gives back a thousand times more than what we put in. If you're in college and you're reading this, please become a scientist (or a doctor) :)
I fully agree with you here, I work in your field currently and noticed the wide range of skills that are employed. For example my lab director is a Physicist working in brain imaging research.
All the math I learned in school (I have a BS in math) seemed so small compared to the stuff I see used in the research the folks in my lab are doing. There is a great need of skilled mathematicians and comp sci folks in these bio based fields, as you pointed out. Biologist are smart people but when it comes to comp sci their cs skill sets are not always large enough for their need. That's where p eople like us fill in the blanks.