Collins: Only seven public microarray datasets existed in the late 1990s
Jim Collins · a16z Podcast | All About Synthetic Biology · Jan 17, 2019 · at 4:08
Jim Collins, bioengineering professor at MIT, recalls the scarcity of genomic data when researchers first attempted to reverse engineer biological networks in the late 1990s.
0:00 / 0:06exact quote · 6.4s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“And when I got pulled in, there were only seven publicly available data sets. So the idea you could reverse engineer large scale network was ludicrous.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Jim Collins
Collins: Leading molecular biologists insisted synthetic genetic toggle switches were impossible
“We had talked to about six or seven very serious molecular biologists who told us this couldn't happen, this couldn't work. They said for it to work, you're going to have to have a very tight off state, two very tight off states. That's going to be impossible.…”
Collins: Single-gene knockout attribution is absurd from a systems standpoint
“I maintain that in almost every biology experiment paper I've read, they've never had the controls that I'd like to see. Which is the idea that you can knock out a gene and that what's lacking and now can be attributed to the gene is absurd from a system stand…”
Collins: Synthetic biology currently lacks established quantitative design principles
“A major challenge in engineering biology, and more broadly, specifically synthetic biology, is that we don't really know the design principles.”
Collins: Platform bio startups target tech VCs; product startups target biotech VCs
“The platform companies in this place are playing to the technology investors. And the product companies are playing more toward the traditional biotech investors.”
Collins: The 21st century will be the century of synthetic biology
“I think in many ways this century is going to be the century of biology, and really to put point on it, I think it's going to be the century of synthetic biology”
Jim Collins: Engineering models have predictive value without mechanism knowledge
“An engineer can do remarkably well in many instances with little, if any, understanding of mechanism. And that we'll get after a black box. You can represent a model that gives you some sense of relation between the input and output of, say, going back to our …”