Profile of Eric Schadt
This article leaves me with a very mixed impression—it’s excessively gosh-wow, but it matches my beliefs that things are generally more complex than they look, and this is especially true about biology.
Schadt doesn’t seem to have much web presence, which makes it harder to judge anything about what he’s doing.
His background was very intellectually deprived—he’s ended up doing serious biology (or at least in high-status jobs in the field) through a combination of moderately good luck and extremely high drive. It leaves me wondering how much talent just gets lost.
ETA: I forgot to mention that the reason I posted is that if Schadt is right that biological systems are extremely complex, that it isn’t feasible to develop drugs based on counteracting the effects of single genes, but that this complexity can be met by people doing networked science, then it’s very important.
That article is an excellent story, but I’m afraid I’m sufficiently jaded by science journalism in practice that I’d want to know Schadt’s opinion of it before taking its contents on board wholesale.
Edit: I’ve just realised something: the calculation that produced the above statement was optimising for social value of the story and its contents to be passed on to others, rather than anything about the science. Then I thought “well, that was silly.” Then I thought “actually, no it wasn’t, that’s its main practical use to me.” More layers at 11.
I agree that hard to tease out truth from fiction from journalists writing on science. I think though this guy is the real deal. While he doesn’t have much web presence you can search him on Google Scholar or the National Library of Medicine’s scientific papers site and he has a very strong scientific presense (many of the papers he has written are free to all). I think the message was exactly, Nancy, that trying to treat diseases with a single drug hitting a single gene will not work for most diseases and that instead network sciences will be key.
I agree that hard to tease out truth from fiction from journalists writing on science. I think though this guy is the real deal. While he doesn’t have much web presence you can search him on Google Scholar or the National Library of Medicine’s scientific papers site and he has a very strong scientific presense (many of the papers he has written are free to all). I think the message was exactly, Nancy, that trying to treat diseases with a single drug hitting a single gene will not work for most diseases and that instead network sciences will be key.
I agree that hard to tease out truth from fiction from journalists writing on science. I think though this guy is the real deal. While he doesn’t have much web presence you can search him on Google Scholar or the National Library of Medicine’s scientific papers site and he has a very strong scientific presense (many of the papers he has written are free to all). I think the message was exactly, Nancy, that trying to treat diseases with a single drug hitting a single gene will not work for most diseases and that instead network sciences will be key.
I found the article written to be inspiring, but it didn’t really give me anything to think about considering how little I know about biology. Unfortunately, it was engaging enough to me that I kept reading it and wasted more time. :P