• notarobot123 a year ago

    > This story is (for the most part) not wrong. It’s plenty good enough to give students a rough notion of how biology works. But its elisions, omissions and simplifications can create serious misconceptions about what genes are and do.

    This sounds like a recurring pattern across any and all fields of scientific research. We create simplified models of the world and forget we are thinking in abstractions that obscure some of the messy and beautiful details of the real world.

    • fastaguy88 a year ago

      Just a minor correction. Most of the proteins encoded by the human genome are NOT enzymes. Only about 17% of the ~20,000 human proteins have known enzyme activities. Many proteins (probably the majority of protein mass in the cell) are structural, and others do signaling and metabolite transport.

      • rini17 a year ago

        The LLMs are cracking all the genomes and molecular biology as we speak. Holding my breath.

        • jowdones a year ago

          [flagged]

          • rini17 a year ago

            Maybe. I'm not so sure anymore.

            • rini17 a year ago

              Why are you so absolutely sure there's no low hanging fruit for AI to pick.

              • jowdones a year ago

                Well @rini, maybe English is not your native language (neither is mine) but between "maybe there's hopefully some yet undiscovered low hanging fruit" and "LLMs are cracking all the genomes and all molecular biology" there's as much distance as between "riding a bicycle" and "interstellar travel at warp speeds".

                • rini17 a year ago

                  Thanks. I should have used crunching.

                  You will have to get used to all the non natives tho. Like The Register and practically everyone else when @evilsocket tweeted "redhat confirmed severity 9.9" they automatically credited the extraordinary severity rating to evilsocket. Which was not the case and caused unnecessary noise around the issue.