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0 pointsbbgm10y ago0 comments

All my experience working in and with biotech/pharma has taught me that your experiments will usually fail. The later they fail the more expensive. Biology is ridiculously hard and certainly not predictable. Aspects are reproducible and engineering-friendly, but most of it is not.

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dnautics10y ago

I think this is a toxic attitude. A friend of mine worked at a bioenergy outfit working on cellulosic ethanol and that was the pervading opinion. For years she tried to convince them that the problem was they weren't controlling their inputs, and finally they did her experiment after she made a statistical argument after a massive DOE setup failed. Turned out they were limiting in a basic metabolic requirement. It's too easy to blame biology when it is often just user error. Bio equivalent of pebkac

They started getting reproducible results, then, major improvements, then the facility got shut down for political reasons and she lost her job.

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