It's literally happening in a new way, for one. Also, the alternative to reporting this story is not reporting this story, which might lead us to the impression that interference in South American elections had ended.
723 karma · joined January 20, 2019
>Although if I did relax this position, I'd then be in need an explanation for why all of biochemistry feels like it takes place in some kind of cartoon universe. Like, maybe I've failed to put my finger on the reason, but I can't shake the feeling that the world being presented in biology class is just a little too cute to be this one.
Here's one possible explanation for this feeling. Consider the alternative world: any time you write a paper about a protein, you have to measure its interactions with every other biomolecule that's present in the cell of interest. Then, you need to model all of those interactions simultaneously. You probably couldn't do that in 10 lifetimes. It's just not practical to do this, so you never read about it. Papers and textbooks necessarily present things in an overly focused way.
So any paper you read has some...selection bias? If you're trying to find a zinc finger that binds some particular DNA sequence, and you find one and it has nanomolar affinity, you don't need to worry about what happens when that ZF binds actin or RNA polymerase or some phospholipid. We already know from the fact that it has nanomolar affinity for its target DNA that it isn't being sequestered by anything else in any measurable way. But its affinity for actin or whatever isn't zero - there IS a number, and they DO interact - it's just that it's incredibly weak and transient, so you're not going to notice it incidentally. Biology may seem cute because the ugly version would cost 20,000x as much to produce.
There are even educational demonstrations where people shake bags of 3D printed proteins with magnets (including competing proteins) and you end up with the expected structure.
So what this fraud does is convince you to give these antibodies a chance when you otherwise wouldn’t have. You should validate them yourself and show they only bind your target before doing an experiment, but now you’re just wasting time and money evaluating something that’s guaranteed to fail.
Antibodies are notoriously unreliable, so you might have to give two or three vendors a try before you get one that works. Now I’m starting to wonder how much of that reputation is due to fraud and not just nature.
It’s like reminding someone they shouldn’t say “bicycle” but should instead say “fahrrad”.
But even having a PhD isn't enough to establish credibility during the interview process, as there are plenty of PhDs who are incompetent. It's really more of a thing that gets your foot in the door - a signal that it's plausible that this candidate could have the juice.
The solution is that after the usual interview steps (resume, phone screen, etc), the candidate gives an hour long seminar on their research to 10-20 people (really 45 minutes of material + 15 minutes of questions). It's basically impossible to talk for that long about your research and the prior literature with a critical audience of experts and not reveal whether you actually know your stuff.
So in a sense, your vision has actually been achieved, but only within the group of people who have traditional credentials. The question of how to open this up to anyone regardless of credentials is not something I'm going to be able to answer, but I certainly hope it does.
In terms of frameworks for evaluating competence, here's the questions I ask when deciding if someone is an expert (and what I get out of these questions in parentheses):
1) Has this person spent years doing something where they constantly discovered that they were wrong? (if you're never wrong, you're not learning and you're certainly not doing anything interesting, and might be a crank)
2) Did they have a mentor or group of expert peers who helped them grow and critiqued their work? (this both helps them grow on a daily basis and also plugs gaps in their knowledge and skills, and gives them new ways of thinking)
3) Have they built or discovered something non-trivial, and in the LLM era, do they actually understand what they built? (You can't really be sure your knowledge and skills are meaningful until you apply them)
4) Can they hold their own when being grilled by other people with deep experience in the same field, or adjacent fields? (This assumes the experts are arguing in good faith, but if you can either answer critical questions or convince someone that their questions are flawed, that's a great sign)
5) Do they have both depth and breadth in their knowledge of their field? (I think this one might get downplayed as it smacks of gatekeeping, but it's so easy to make huge errors or reinvent the wheel when you don't know what other people have already done, and don't know how your contribution fits into the work of others)
6) Can they explain their work on multiple levels of complexity? (Filters out people who are just trying to hide their incompetence with jargon)
7) Are they willing to say they don't know, when asked a question they don't know the answer to? (Cranks will never admit this)
What the hell is this amino acid view? This is not how genes work at all. This is biology 101 and it's completely wrong. Why did you buy a domain name to share disinformation that you don't even understand?
None of this is displayed in a way that would be useful to working biologists, and I don't see how this could be used as a teaching tool even if all the errors were corrected. This simply doesn't provide any insight into how phages work. Looking at a raw sequence is pointless (also that color scheme is incredibly garish) - you need annotations! The 3D structures don't have their domains labeled and you can't connect sequence features to structural elements.
Why wouldn't you just use all of the existing tools that already do all of this correctly? Look, I don't mean to gate keep, and it's great that you learned something (assuming you didn't vibe code this), but this is a lot of effort that could have been avoided if you had had a single conversation with a biologist of any background, or asked an LLM to critique your idea, or made a single reddit post asking if this would be useful.
Edit: This may come across as super harsh - but really, I love the enthusiasm and I hope you keep pursuing this. But the right place for this passion at this point in your life is a classroom or some kind of structured course.