I think this point from the introduction says it best:
> - From a more practical point of view, we have a very limited ability to construct, test, and compare designs. Even with recent developments such as CRISPR, our ability to rapidly and precisely produce cells with well-defined genomes remains limited compared to what is possible in more advanced disciplines. (This situation is rapidly improving!)
Somehow this makes me think of the griping of background NPC scientists in the classic game Deus Ex, which I think has a rather high quality of year-2052 technobabble.
_________
DONOVAN: It's really a question of abstraction. [...] You can't be dealing with this sort of thing on the base-pair level.
LUNDQUIST: Essentially what I told Miss Chow. Tissue augmentation... it's not a matter of twiddling bits.
DONOVAN: We need to stay focused on tools.
LUNDQUIST: In principle... Yes, I agree.
DONOVAN: The older scientists don't grasp what it means to have so much data.
LUNDQUIST: Still, we have to throw them a bone once in awhile.
DONOVAN: With the right software, organism design should be indistinguishable from CAD/CAM.
"Advanced undergraduate" or "beginning graduate." It's Caltech though so the distinction is a bit meaningless.
This is because graduate students main focus is their research, and courses are a distant second.
I say this because it drops into diffeqs and fairly subtle/complex behavior quickly.
These sorts of classes tend to get students in a broad range of levels, and I think there's the expectation that they'll figure out whatever they're unfamiliar with. I doubt this class is targeted to graduate students, but Caltech classes tend not to have a graduate/undergraduate distinction.
difeq is part of the common core that everyone must take to graduate and taught to sophomores first term, although a few (maybe 10-15 or so each year? out of about 200-250) (as of about a decade ago) students will test out of ma1a and then take ma2a first term freshman year instead of sophomore year. Testing out of ma1a requires knowing both calculus and also proof techniques.
courses numbered 100-199 are taken by both undergrads and graduate students, and because of Caltech's "rigorous" core often (but not always) the undergrads have an easier time.
I don't know this class specifically, but you would probably have a couple super motivated sophomores but mostly juniors and seniors taking a course numbered like this. Occasionally a few people will take 100-level courses freshman year (I took one such full-year and 1 one-term class, and I wasn't the only frosh in either).
(humanities/social science courses numbered 100+ are a bit of a different matter and tend to be super easy, but no one really takes those classes seriously for obvious reasons)
