IntFee588

> just cherrypicking some niche area of use case just for the sake of differentiation, yet somehow it's worth billions of dollars in market cap.

If only there was a company that financed such ventures.

> if a stock market crash triggered by this is realistic

Honestly, I don't think it is and there would be more media attention if it was. The firms that are shorting GME only have something like $50 billion AUM. Lehman Bros was around $600 billion and was a lot more integral to the markets. The only real issue would be a lack of liquidity, which isn't going to cause a crash alone.

Besides the huge push on dogecoin, which is big for onboarding people into crypto (yes, I know DOGE isn't DeFi), the bottlenecking of orders by brokerages undermines people's faith in the fairness of traditional securities and the markets. People will be more interested in decentralized solutions where they can have more faith in exchanges (I am aware that DeFi is not that decentralized or fair, but the majority of the public that is aware of crypto and DeFi thinks it is, just as they thought that traditional securities were fair).

I know this forum is capitalist to the core, but there is a lack of appreciation for this moment and an undue air of cynicism.

This whole situation breaks a ton of fundamental assumptions about how markets work and will change hedging strategies for a lot of investors moving forward. Yes, we know there are hedge funds on both sides of this equation (Blackrock owns 12% of Gamestop, Burry made a ton and smartly got out earlier in the week), it doesn't change anything. The internet is already searching for more securities to manipulate. This will accelerate adoption of the DeFi space. Scaramucci called it "the French Revolution of Finance."

Instead of being negative, look to see how you can learn and profit from this.

Haha I see that now, I've been on forums and reddit too long.

> Levinthal's paradox

What I was getting at here is that the answer to the question "does every protein have a default native conformation" is "yes."

[Levinthal's paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levinthal's_paradox) was the thought experiment that "proved" that protein folding is non-random. This is currently the dominant attitude in the field.

As others have stated, misfoldings do occur, and the protein is trying to achieve its lowest energy conformation, but the simplest answer is that we don't have a complete answer, hence the desire to come up with a reliable computational solution. We know how certain residues affect tertiary structure, and we know the measurements of secondary structures with a surprising degree of accuracy, but for a protein with potentially hundreds of residues, there are simply too many degrees of freedom to simply tack on amino acids and come up with a structure (although this is essentially the approach that markov chain, monte carlo solutions use).

[This article gives a pretty good synopsis of where computational approaches to the protein folding problem stand.](https://moalquraishi.wordpress.com/2018/12/09/alphafold-casp...)

When the intern learns figma.

In general I agree, genetic and even epigenetic testing tends to identify problems at a point where gene therapy is no longer an option, so why bother? But if you can take tissue samples, we're getting to the point were we can detect cancers from SVs and fusions fairly easily. It'd be a easy sale to sell blood tests for leukemia, for example. That alone won't justify the cost, but we're making progress.

Overall, this is a fantastic article that touches on a lot of the issues in the biotech.

Laypeople hear the term "biotech" and think of bionics, but most firms operate doing wet-lab work or synthesizing reagents/kits. The academic influence slows everything down and there is active discouragement of "outside the box" thinking. Consumer products are an afterthought for most firms.

I think the industry is capable of great things... eventually. But that success will come from a) an area with a much looser regulatory environment than the US, b) a team with a multidisciplinary background (most academics are too narrowly specialized to reliably see the "big picture" that is required to make commercially viable products) and c) a team with funding that far exceeds the current dollar figures we see for some start-ups.

Mass spec and NGS are technologies that have become drastically cheaper in recent years and could be consumer ready soon. It's just a matter of being the first person with the funding and desire to bring them to the mass market.