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this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2025
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Man, it's so wild how little we know about biology and how much we as a society spend on absolute, utter, bullshit, instead of figuring out how just the basics of us work.
I know it was never possible before modern computers, labs, and equipment, but we really should have like 1000x the amount of basic biological research going on that we do.
I got a degree in microbiology in 95 and I did not know about these. Heck I even did a rotation in an xray crystallography lab which was super into cellular structures.
To be brutally honest, 95 was an eternity ago in microbiology terms. Human genome project didn’t complete till 2003. You must have some wild perspective on seeing us go from what are essentially a modern dark times to modern day
oh certainly. even at that time the xray crystallography lab was basically dying out as it was becoming more of a standard tool rather than an area of research.
From the Age of Enlightenment to essentially space flight, in a single career. 🤓🤌🏼
Oh I think my thing is a bit misleading. I left the field in 1998 and switched to IT for the pay. I pretty much stopped being on the inside at that time.
No worries, I was being hyperbolic anyhow 🤓🤪
my exact feelings, I was like how come I did not know about these
the new update to reality dropped last year. not your fault.
They apparently even patched the text books!
A super important nuclear structure related to calcium mobilization was only discovered a few years ago. It will take years before it ever appears in bachelor's textbooks, let alone high school material. Cellular biology is far for complete, and biology as a whole is still completely filled with open questions.
We do suffer a lot with a lack of funding though. If your research isn't immediately important for a medication, good luck working with a far from optimal budget.
Ask any expert in almost any field of science. If they're good at their jobs, they'll mostly tell you the same thing about their field.
The scariest thing in the world is that you can apply that to nearly everything.
This isn't really true. It's kind of true for scientists because by their nature, they work on discovering new things, but even still, the amount we know and understand about say, physics and chemistry, is way way way greater than biology.
Like for physics and chemistry we have a very rock solid understanding of how the vast majority of reactions and interactions that effect the universe at our scale, work. Most of what physicists and chemists are learning these days is at the outer edges of what's physically possible or studying, there's very few questions left about common, day to day reactions, those are so well understood that they're considered engineering and not science anymore.
But that's not the case for biology. We still don't understand very basic elementary things about the human body and what parts of it even do, let alone the wider, non human biological world. There is truly more unknowns in biology than the other sciences.
Meanwhile in weapons research
"Why can't I hold all this grant money, lol?"
Is taking people apart not biology?
I think that's physics
Depends how fast you do it.
we think about people 100 or 500 years ago and it seems absurd just how little they knew about health and the body, but hopefully we'll look the same to our descendants in as many years
When I was much younger, the favorite restaurant my family used to treat ourselves to every so often had tables decorated with olde timey newspaper pages. Still very much legible and permanently preserved in epoxy, the advertisements fascinated me — even way back when (≈/< 1930s), the same kinds of "revolutionary" "exotic" "new" tricks that <insert expert title(s)> hate, etc. squawked their bullshit for the punters & mouth breathers. Hell, even Pompeii revealed it's been going on for millennia... Same as it ever was. 🙇🏽♂️🤓😅
You should check out the dollop podcast. Recently they started doing a segment (the past times) where they read sections from old newspapers (even stuff from the 18th and 19th centuries). Some crazy stuff got printed back in the day and it's interesting to see how people viewed papers way back in the day.
https://player.fm/series/the-dollop-with-dave-anthony-and-gareth-reynolds-2313603
The absolute, utterly bullshit is what leads to other advances and a better understanding of the basics. For example, optical storage technology is a direct result of a federally funded study on how moth eyes gather and utilize light.
👀🤩
Yeah, I'm not talking about developing new computer technologies as utter bullshit, I'm talking about the trillions spent on advertising for instance, or social media platforms.
It's astonishing to me just how confidently people, often those who've never even studied the body, will assert they definitely know how things work. DNA is the big one for me, as there's an entire "layer" of genetic function which we know almost nothing about. We may have mapped the atomic structure of DNA, and identified a number of sequences of base pairs which can be correlated with certain traits, yet how DNA "folds" and why remains almost a complete mystery. Many think that scientists have reached a level where we can splice our genetic code as though it were a computer program to make it do this or that, yet in reality attempts to do so almost never work, usually resulting in sterility or death.
The mystery remains but we certainly can splice our genetic code without sterility or death. There are various FDA approved therapies doing just so to treat genetic diseases such as sickle cell, hemophilia, certain types of DMD, and retinopathies.
Oh it's certainly possible to do. Just that it's incredibly dangerous, which is why there is an extremely rigorous testing regime in place, taking many, many years, which must be completed before any particular therapy is approved. Many proposed therapies are never able to successfully complete testing because the most common side effects by far are sterility and death.
Not entirely true. Humans have successfully modified the genome of plants and especially bacteria in a targeted way for years now. But things are of course much more complex in humans and vertebrates in general.