Report: Smart contact lens and other ambitious projects at Verily are floundering
As an IT person with only a degree in CS and historically little interest except for IT and maybe some engineering topics the best time I invested in decades was to start - completely by accident - on the medical track.<p>Hundreds of lecture hours and a plethora of courses in chemistry, org. chemistry, drug development (chemistry), statistics (with focus on medical topics), anatomy, physiology, (some) bio-chemistry, and neuroscience later I have learned sooooo much.<p>All simplistic&#x2F;optimistic (or in the case of antibiotics pessimistic) mass-media headlines are almost complete bullshit. In that field you MUST look at the details. Which of course require some knowledge to understand - but actually not all <i>that</i> much, just some basics. I&#x27;ve also met quite a few doctors by now, some of them in research, and see a common path from youthful optimism to disillusionment. Not as in &quot;giving up&quot;, just getting rid of baseless optimism about what is achievable and with what effort, and resetting goals (to much lower levels).<p>For an easy example, how many IT people think the brain works like a computer? That it&#x27;s &quot;binary based&quot;?<p>For illustration, here are two serious (but fun) papers written by a biologist and by a neuroscientist, respectively:<p>&quot;Can a biologist fix a radio?—Or, what I learned while studying apoptosis&quot; - <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cell.com&#x2F;cancer-cell&#x2F;fulltext&#x2F;S1535-6108(02)00133-2" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cell.com&#x2F;cancer-cell&#x2F;fulltext&#x2F;S1535-6108(02)00133...</a><p>&quot;Could a neuroscientist understand a microprocessor?&quot; - <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;biorxiv.org&#x2F;content&#x2F;early&#x2F;2016&#x2F;05&#x2F;26&#x2F;055624" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;biorxiv.org&#x2F;content&#x2F;early&#x2F;2016&#x2F;05&#x2F;26&#x2F;055624</a><p>I think engineers benefit greatly from studying some (freshman university level) biology, bio-chemistry, physiology. In engineering everything is so much simpler, so one tends to try and use ones experience in ones own field when looking at those fields. In reality it&#x27;s a great mess. If you had to debug source code written by evolution over more than a billion years you&#x27;d have no chance - no chance at all - with any of the methods you used. Even the most disgusting project messed up over decades by rotating hoards of unqualified programmers who in addition all couldn&#x27;t care less and managers who magnified the mess could not remotely create a software project as messed up.<p>Imagine Microsoft Office Suite source code run through several obfuscation tools. On top of that, the test suites only test an incredibly tiny amount of potential inputs <i>(the amount of &quot;inputs&quot; where a biological system fails exceeds the ones when it works by several orders of magnitude)</i> - and they go &quot;green&quot; as long as the software starts and runs at all for some very small amount of time, even if it runs badly. An it&#x27;s <i>still</i> easier to debug than even a tiny biological system.