I'm a human geneticist, working as an assistant professor at the Department of Systems Biology at Columbia University and New York Genome Center, and old friend of Pieter's. I find your comment extremely ignorant and obnoxious.
Tens of thousands of researchers - medical doctors, biologists, chemists, computer scientists, etc - have been working for tens of years to cure cancer, all around the world. Billions of dollars have been spent and are being spent on this effort. Trying to cure cancer is already one of the largest projects of the humankind, and much of it happens with open source code and open data.
Your idea that "an open source 'Let's solve bile duct cancer with metastases in the lungs' project" could somehow suddenly find a cure within a few months is extremely naive and completely ignorant of the realities of cancer research. This is not a piece of code that you can debug just like that on your computer - you'd need to do complex analysis to find out what has caused Pieter's cancer, figure out what drugs might target it (and potentially develop new drugs which takes many many years) and administer these drugs, while monitoring the situation with complex analyses, and risking making things much worse. This is like telling someone whose Mac crashed and who needs a working computer in 15 minutes that he should write a new OS.
tuuliel13 karma
I'm a human geneticist, working as an assistant professor at the Department of Systems Biology at Columbia University and New York Genome Center, and old friend of Pieter's. I find your comment extremely ignorant and obnoxious.
Tens of thousands of researchers - medical doctors, biologists, chemists, computer scientists, etc - have been working for tens of years to cure cancer, all around the world. Billions of dollars have been spent and are being spent on this effort. Trying to cure cancer is already one of the largest projects of the humankind, and much of it happens with open source code and open data.
Your idea that "an open source 'Let's solve bile duct cancer with metastases in the lungs' project" could somehow suddenly find a cure within a few months is extremely naive and completely ignorant of the realities of cancer research. This is not a piece of code that you can debug just like that on your computer - you'd need to do complex analysis to find out what has caused Pieter's cancer, figure out what drugs might target it (and potentially develop new drugs which takes many many years) and administer these drugs, while monitoring the situation with complex analyses, and risking making things much worse. This is like telling someone whose Mac crashed and who needs a working computer in 15 minutes that he should write a new OS.
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