Pet theory: for most of human history, biology has been an increasingly complex detective story, a notepad of mysteries laying on a table next to an unfathomably massive evidence room stuffed with barely organized facts. This appeals to certain people and not to others. Only recently has it become possible to approach it from more of an engineering perspective, which appeals to a different set of people.
can you expand this thought? I'm on your path but not to your destination yet.
Can I summarize it as: Earlier, biology was "hunt and peck" or "observe" ... and now we're moving to a more "rigor of process & ability to create as seen in the past few decades of computer science now applying to biology" type of world?
Here's a story to illustrate. Recently there was a headline about some project at MIT that used CRISPR to figure out the function of every protein in a human cell (or something like that, I'm sure I misinterpreted it in some way). I told a friend who is an actual biologist, and he said of course they didn't literally do that, that would be impossible. So I guess what they really did was.... something-something with CRISPR that gave information about a wide range of proteins in the cell, or something. They added a lot of facts to the library. But they marketed it as if they had made a huge stride towards understanding how the whole machine works. That gets people like me more excited. We'd like to know how the machine works and then use that to make it work better.
I believe the parent refers to this [1,2,3] study. Indeed, this was about targeting many (11,923) genes with Perturb-seq (CRISPR screen with single-cell RNA-sequencing readout). There are two human cell lines used in the study (K562 and RPE1). For functional annotation, authors focused on 1,973 targeted genes that had strong transcriptional phenotype after the perturbation. As there's some correlation structure, that's what they studied, annotating clusters of individual perturbations using public databases (like STRING [4]) and literature. Seems like a lot of great work has been done here though stating that we now know all the functions of all the genes might be a bit of a stretch indeed.
