Jun's Blog

Output, activities, memo and etc.

Desire for big picture - Siddhartha Mukherjee

Let's say that you are at a restaurant, you are hungry. Do you like ordering a food without seeing all the menu? Or you want to order it after seeing all the menu, checking which is the best? The second pattern connects to the desire for seeing a big picture. The desire to spend time for the most important thing.

I did read Siddhartha Mukherjee [1]'s 3 books in order by 3. => 2. => 1.

  1. The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
  2. The Laws of Medicine
  3. The Gene: An Intimate History

"A Biography of Cancer" was the most impressed book. It's about the history of change. How have some people changed the things. It's not only about medical or cancer topic.

There is an interview for him in the end of the first half book Japanese edition. If I translate it to English, that is like this.

Question: You are clinical oncologist and father. How did you manage to find the time to write such as a large scaled and detailed book?

Answer: I had to create the time. What it's important is I had a reason for that. ... (snip) ... The urgent desire to tell the story enabled me to continue to write it.

The desire is what Yuval Harari also has. His expertise (the thing making the money) was crusade history. But he had to write Sapiens as his side work.

It's fortunate that Siddhartha Mukherjee and Yuval Harari are well-known in the current world.

Here is also his TED talk.

www.youtube.com

References

DNA sequencing: Standing of the shoulders of giants

Learning materials of DNA sequencing

I found the teaching materials of Ben Langmead who is the author of bowtie and bowtie2. This is a great material to learn DNA sequencing.

Langmead Lab @ Johns Hopkins University - Teaching Materials: http://www.langmead-lab.org/teaching-materials

Fast high level programming languages for bioinformatics

According to the Heng Li who is the author of samtools, bwa and minimap2.

R/Python/Bash tends to be recognized as the "three main pillars" of Bioinformatics.

But does it really align with the effectiveness? The Heng's research on his blog gives the chance for people to rethink the high level languages to be used in Bioinformatics.

Fast high-level programming languages: http://lh3.github.io/2020/05/17/fast-high-level-programming-languages