• notarobot123 2 days 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 day 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 2 days ago

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

        • jowdones 2 days ago

          @rini: that's got to be satire, what you're saying, because nobody can be that stupid to actually believe it.

          • rini17 18 hours ago

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

            • jowdones 17 hours 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 2 days ago

              Maybe. I'm not so sure anymore.