Top all-time · #6761
Omics! Omics!
Personal blog · omicsomics.blogspot.comsciencedata
Omics! Omics! is a personal blog at omicsomics.blogspot.com about science and data. Since 2011, 11 different Hacker News readers have linked it 14 times, most often “Computational Biology and Math: Am I Just Faking It?”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-11-02, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (4) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Keith Robison's genomics and biotech blog. HN readers link it for skeptical coverage of the arsenic-life claims and for explaining why DNA synthesis businesses are hard.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 4 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
A computational biologist's personal views on new technologies & publications on genomics & proteomics and their impact on drug discovery
Most-linked posts?
- Computational Biology and Math: Am I Just Faking It?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-08-07
What Hacker News says?
CRISPR. My naivete surrounded me. I didn't realize that even though there was a high output of genetic marker tests that very few if of them would result in viable CRISPR targets. There's 60K genetic marker tests on the market. 8 to 10 new ones come out each day. Humanity has little hope of figuring out the sort of "druggable targets." Genome Wide Association Studies aren't like websites or apps waiting to be optimi…
Comment linking /2017/03/targets-drugability-revisited.html
on “Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?”Submitted Want to build a sequencer? 454.bio opens up their plans as a story · 145 points
HN discussionSerious biologists were very skeptical from the start : http://omicsomics.blogspot.com/2010/12/arsenic-and-new-micro... Soon, there were lots of questions : http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/06/01/return_of_th... I'm thinking NASA is good at space exploration, not so good at biology.
Comment linking /2010/12/arsenic-and-new-microbes.html
on “Arsenic life does not exist after all...”Submitted Computational Biology and Math: Am I Just Faking It? as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThere’s ~ 15K-20K diseases that we’ve classified. There’s 3.2Bn genetic base pairs. There’s just over 7Bn people. Maybe like 7M-20M people suffer from a disease or even well below or above that. Finding someone at a given time in the exact modality that would be testable by a given trial is really hard. Genes are sets of base pairs. A lot of drug discovery is a situation where you have to test compounds empirically…
Comment linking /2017/03/targets-drugability-revisited.html
on “Cancer Isn’t a Logic Problem”Submitted Bill Gates succumbs to moonshot madness as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThere is also a good blog post by Keith Robison on why DNA synthesis businesses are hard: http://omicsomics.blogspot.com/2017/01/gen9-vanishes.html
Comment linking /2017/01/gen9-vanishes.html
on “How a biotech startup rose, and then fell”Submitted Oxford Nanopore's Riposte to Illumina Trade Action as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Computational Biology and Math: Am I Just Faking It? as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted HGP Counterfactuals, Part 1: An Introduction as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Wikipedia, and other non-evil things as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Digging into the Illumina Lawsuit vs. Oxford Nanopore as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted NGS Saves A Young Life as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Ion Torrent's Data Quality is Pretty Good as a story · 1 points
HN discussion