Ask HN: How to get into genetics/biology being over 30?
I have been a long time lurker but got to a point now where I am stuck on how to look for an answer and thought that this crowd might have some good insight.
There was a question about how to raise funds for rare disease research (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30250496) posted yesterday that felt like the last drop for me to try to pursue learning about genetics.
If one wants to learn about how the genetic code works, how proteins work, and be able to investigate their functions what kind of undergrad program does one need to apply to? I still have trouble explaining what exactly I am trying to do, but let me try:
For various times in my life I've thought I should study genetics and try to learn about how life works in its essence. For the past few months, I have been stumbling upon various posts and websites that talk about new discoveries on understanding of human genome, therapies being developed and so on. Almost as if getting a sign that I should dive into learning it as it is something that I feel I am interested in. Knowing how to code definitely seems to be something that helps, but I don't want to work on simply getting genetic data I don't understand and write software that apply transformations or generate visualizations of this kind of data and make it available for scientists to do what I deem to be the most interesting part of the work. I want to be able to understand what the data means and be able to review and reflect about it and give input to advance the understanding in the field.
So, if one wants to get in this field to be able to do research on how genes relate to diseases and have a deeper understanding of protein formation and inner workings as well as have access to equipment that would allow performing this kind of research, what should one study? Is going back to college and taking an undergrad course the best way? Or is there a way of learning this kind of stuff at home (and if so, how does one do that)? I'd assume that it might not be possible to go too far by studying at home just because without access to equipment it might be very hard to make progress in this area.
I don't know if it matters, but I am in my mid 30s and my work is completely unrelated. I work in security and programming, and have not had any kind of exposure to this kind of biology other than what you learn at highschool (and that was about 20 years ago). I am at a point where I feel my interest in the field seems to be diminishing and I might be burnt out. For some years now I have been trying to figure out what would be a different career path I could try, but always ended up at a point where I felt none of them had any meaning in the end. When I think about learning about this topic, I get this warm feeling I haven't had in a while and don't have that dreaded feeling that my work won't matter, because I genuinely think it can be important.
I wouldn't be doing this for the money (I honestly don't even know how much money one makes in this line of work) but for the chance to learn, satisfy my curiosity and with luck help advance our understanding of how living things work. And hopefully being able to do this kind of work would allow me to offer to help in situations such as the post mentioned above.
Any help or advice on how to proceed on this, or how to become a bit less ignorant in order to be able to understand what exactly it is I am trying to achieve would be very appreciated. Anyone working in the field that could share their experience in it and how they got into it, would also be very appreciated.
Thanks!
PS: Sorry if the line of thought is all over the place there, I was trying to convey what I want to do and the way I am feeling about it while not missing any information I think would be important.
PPS: The throwaway account is due to me mentioning burn out and not wanting to have such information traced back to me.
9 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 28.8 ms ] threadhttps://www.edx.org/course/introduction-to-biology-the-secre...
I did a specialization in system biology. System biology is especially interesting for engineers as it tends to use the same point of view as do engineers.
Then I went to my local university to have master courses in bioinformatics. Then it happened that a guy in my step family got ALS (Lou's Gehrig disease). It was the second person to have it so I started to focus on familial ALS for obvious reasons.
I have a blog with ~500 posts on neurodegenerative diseases and in 2019 I wrote a book on the state of ALS research that I keep updated every 6 months.
It took me one year to go through the specialization on system biology at Coursera. In overall I estimate it took 3 years of online courses. The Edx course (intro to...) is very interesting and demanding but it is mostly about core concepts and historical aspects. As ArtWomb said you will not learn state of art information in this course.
> Would you suggest me to take any of them?
Why not, but it depends on what you already know, the time you have, etc...I was used to R&D methods and culture beforehand because of my job.
> How do you go about doing such specialization? It's on Coursera:
https://www.coursera.org/specializations/systems-biology
> Just found a college that had the course and signed up to it? Was that in the US? It was in France, at Rennes I university. There are many low cost opportunities in France, but I felt that the quality of the Coursera courses was much higher than what I learned at the uni.
> Did you end up getting a job at the university to be able to conduct research? Or are you allowed to just visit and use their facilities for that?
I didn't get a job, first because I am old, retired and also because I do not expect to find a so interesting job in a small university in France. A laboratory in a large company would fit my tastes better. The reasons are:
I think what matters is not only the ability to do interesting stuff, you can do as much interesting studies from your armchair than in a university because you can access public and not so public databases and there is an incredible amount of software available for free and people willing to help.
A real glass ceiling is that you must belong to a good team to be recognized for your work:
Scientists do not read single author papers.
The field is filled with in an incredible amount of low quality publications.
For example in my chosen field (ALS research) there is an important work published roughly every two years, yet every week people are claiming to make breakthrough and every year 15,000 papers are published.
Even among recognized scientists there are schools of thought that are incompatible, with contradictory findings never discussed or even addressed. For example nobody agrees on what is causing Alzheimer, Parkinson, ALS, MS, etc...
Important symptoms like muscle wasting are not investigated by muscle scientists who prefer studying neurons.
Even weirder: In brain, glial cells largely outnumbers (10/1) neurons, yet few publications mention them.
It's hard to make a contribution, so I prefer to discuss articles that I find interesting, in the hope to improve a bit the signal/noise ratio.
> Scientists do not read single author papers.
Hearing about this fact that a lot of papers get published but that single author papers are kinda discriminated (perhaps that is not the correct term for this) is a bit discouraging but I can understand it. There is no way 15k papers can be reviewed like that, so to a certain point it might make sense. On the other hand, what chance does one then have to make a contribution to the field? PR stunts to get your voice heard? Might be a hard problem to solve.
> Even among recognized scientists there are schools of thought that are incompatible, with contradictory findings never discussed or even addressed. For example nobody agrees on what is causing Alzheimer, Parkinson, ALS, MS, etc...
This is one of the things I want to be able to better understand as I study in this field. Why is that? My current view of things is that some characteristics of the disease being studied should be common on all cases, so there should be at least some consensus on "what is the thing that is wrong that is common among all those cases?" that could then be studied to figure out how that thing being wrong causes the disease. But it could be just that I am still too ignorant on the subject and don't know what is the depth of this discussion.
> I think what matters is not only the ability to do interesting stuff, you can do as much interesting studies from your armchair than in a university because you can access public and not so public databases and there is an incredible amount of software available for free and people willing to help.
This is something I find to be awesome. I have been poking around some resources such as encodeproject.org and ncbi and the amount of information available is incredible. The issue I am having with them is that sometimes information doesn't match (for example, the address of a gene is different depending on what transcription description I am looking at). Because of this, I get a feeling that relying on the information that is made available online alone might not be enough without being able to verify that the data you are working on actually is correct. Is this something that is feasible? Or would this field be mostly trusting data from others and then working with it and hoping it is correct?
BTW, I tried visiting your blog, but it seems that the navigation of posts is broken. Whenever I try to click the links to see posts from previous years I get a 404 page. If you ever get that fixed, would you mind dropping me a line? I wanted to read your first posts to see how your studies in the field evolved.
That's the easiest part, usually it is achieved since a long time. But biology is incredibly complicated, much more than everything else. It's certainly not something linear with one causal event and a unique consequence. Beings have selected multiple pathways to achieve a function during million of years. Multiple systems are interacting and changing roles. For example there is not a unique immune system but a galaxy of components assuming different roles at different times.
And technology plays an important role, a century ago we were unable to discern anything else than neurons in a brain, now we can "see" multiple glial cells. How to theorize about something we do not know as existing?
> On the other hand, what chance does one then have to make a contribution to the field?
The best is to work with scientists to solve some issue and them publish with them. I once talked with someone who did that with success. So the problem now is to meet scientists. The easiest way is to present a poster in a conference in order to meet a maximum of scientists at a low cost. If you are not accustomed to "posters" it's a one page summary of what is often a future paper. Master and PhD students are accustomed to present posters but usually there is no other entry barriers than the cost of attending the conference (~$800).
> for example, the address of a gene is different depending on what transcription description I am looking at
Probably because they use different reference genomes. The reference genomes are arbitrary, all humans have slightly different genomes. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1000_Genomes_Project
> I get a 404 page
Many thanks, I will look at this ASAP.