14 Comments
Feb 19, 2023Liked by Elliot Hershberg

May I ask for a piece of advice? What books (scientific, or other sources) would you recommend to read to establish some foundation about biology, DNA and so on for someone who has next to zero previous knowledge in biology but studied physics and has experience in AI and big data? Thank you

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Thanks for reading! I always recommend Molecular Biology of The Cell as a surprisingly readable but canonical resource for the world of biology. A few pages a day would get you far.

I'm also thinking about developing more educational materials over time, so stay tuned!

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Feb 20, 2023Liked by Elliot Hershberg

Yes, that's a very important intersection. What roles do LLMs have to contribute? In immunology a recommendable book for an absolute tyro is Immune by Philipp Dettmer.

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Consider reading a recent essay on Protein Language Models, on very application of LLMs to biology.

https://centuryofbio.substack.com/p/learning-the-language-of-variants

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Thx. Will do.

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Thank you ! Happy to have discovered your newsletter.

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Thanks Ershad!

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Feb 20, 2023Liked by Elliot Hershberg

Really excellent discussion Elliot; you're a gifted teacher. Any good books can you recommend that both provide both an introduction to computational biology and a survey of near current results in the field?

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Thanks Michael! To my knowledge, there aren't a ton of great high-level/introductory materials on the world of computational biology, but stay tuned—I'm considering expanding with some educational materials.

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Feb 19, 2023·edited Feb 19, 2023Liked by Elliot Hershberg

This is truly exciting work and huge game changer. I'm looking forward to all the good things it can do and hope there is accelerating focus on these kinds of techniques being brought to practical applications to save and improve our lives.

I just hope there is some work being done to protect us from potential evil uses of this technology. I suspect access to this kind of custom immune cells and such could also be used to create things like causing undetectable death of targeted individuals.

One good thing (I presume) is that its not like manipulating bacteria or viruses that can replicate out and spread like a pandemic?

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Thanks Robert! There are certainly risks associated with the increasing power of biotechnology. I plan to write a bit about the state of biosecurity in the coming year.

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Feb 19, 2023Liked by Elliot Hershberg

Excellent, very exciting research!

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Feb 19, 2023Liked by Elliot Hershberg

Ah a great read! Such promising results. Excited to see how software starts playing an increased role in the development of these MVPs

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Thanks Elliot. I conjecture that the Fifth Industrial Revolution is already well underway and is being led by astoundingly rapid progress in both biology and computer science, followed closely by materials science. To guess just how rapidly things will continue to develop is well nigh impossible. We're very close to truly major breakthroughs on all fronts. Your newsletter is a great source of information on this! Thank you.

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