Tools for Stepping Into Biology - by Daniel George
Biology isn’t about linear journeys—it’s about targeted explorations. You don't need to understand the entire system to make a meaningful contribution. It's like being told to do a bug fix in a sprawling, undocumented legacy codebase. In this type of legacy system, where variables have names like x1, tmp, and data_new_final_v2, a debugger is your best friend. With a debugger, it doesn't matter that they're named that way. You'll jump around and set breakpoints to understand just enough of the surrounding context to solve your problem. The traditional paper format doesn't lend itself to this kind of nonlinear, context-specific understanding. Traditional papers, despite giving you the correct source code with names like SCN9A, LacI, rtTA, etc., don't give you contextual adaptability. What I want for working on biology is a medium that can provide just enough of the surrounding context to get my work done—much like how a debugger can aid me in understanding legacy code. What if, instead o
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