alt Hacker NewsI'm sure people will take this the wrong way, but a lot of the people who are on HN and who orbit technology circles in SF are really just not actually intellectually curious people.
They might like to think they are, they might try to pretend they are, but when pushed they're simply not.
Look at all of the groupthink that is perpetuated nonstop while they also proclaim they're creating, investing in, etc. so many unique ideas. Yet year after year it's the same thing in a different color.
What they actually are is interested in money and prestige. So give it a little time and they'll learn enough about biology to try and get some validation from their peers with comments. If money actually pours into bio that is.
I'd go even further: what happens in biology is antithetical to the way software people think.
The HN/YC crowd generally has software brain: https://www.theverge.com/podcast/917029/software-brain-ai-ba..., "when you see the whole world as a series of databases that can be controlled with the structured language of software code". Biology doesn't work like that most of the time, it's squishy and weird and unpredictable, and the models we have of biology (including genomics!) are faulty at best, misleading at worst. I've supervised PhD-students and it takes some time for people's brains to be comfortable with that squishiness, that random behaviour, that 'putting A into the system only rarely produces B and we don't really know why but we do it anyway' view of the world. Software engineers struggle, even abhor that kind of world, which is why you rarely see them being interested in it; and if they work in it, outcomes are sometimes amazing and Nobel Prize worthy, more often nonsense that silently disappears.