Michael Franklin is a Software Engineer at the Centre for Population Genomics, and a former student of mine. This was a really interesting chat that roamed all over the place! Have a listen.
“If you want to do methods development or algorithm development then you need quite a high level of domain expertise”
“Genomics is interesting, because any situation is possible. Rules exist, with as many exceptions as they bring.”
“There’s the facebook headline, then there’s the news article that it was written on, and then you have the piece that the university put out, and then you have the study itself.”
“We’re good pattern finding machines.”
“It makes me feel that people – a lot of what we do is one giant statistical generator. Can we guess the next word that comes out?”
“Maybe we aren’t as special as we think we are. There’s not something absolutely innate or crazy about the brain.”
“Not all cancers are the same. You might have the same type of phenotypically driven lung cancer, but underlying the biological mechanism is completely different. That personalised medicine is you can actually look at the tumour and physically look at the somatic signature for the cancer, and say like ‘hey, it’s driven by that gene’ and if we can deactivate that gene with some medication that’s harmless to the rest of the body, then we can stop it.”
“More data, right? more data and smarter ways to crunch it and better ways to model that information is leading to really really positive health outcomes.”
